











^. V-, 



^b. 



-^ e 



xO<^^. 



.-" ^0 



c\. 



'C' 






'"oo^ 



xO<^. 



o 



•'' c- 



^^. 



\ 









■% ^^' 



<^. 



"-^^ 



.\^ 



^5 -% 



^A v^ 



3^ 



-<3 



Ci^ 



.0^ 



^oo"^ 









"^-, 



<J' ,v 






.x^% 



•\ 



5.0°^ 



o 0^ 



^^-- V^ 



^N^ 



<" 






^ o 



\' 



:%^# : 



^oo^ 











V ^ ■> '^ , _ 



<!- ■> " « A -^ 



iO°,. 



O 



IN SHAKSPERE'S ENGLAND 







7/ c/^^? ^A.ir. 



a/s.^/ e Zys 



■^/ce-?. 



r./. .^/oiez./y:/'ff/-f^/t S/'t^r 



IN SHAKSPERE'S 
ENGLAND 



BY 



MRS. FREDERICK BOAS 

AUTHOR OF "ENGLISH HISTORY FOR CHILDREN' 



NEW YORK 
JAMES POTT AND CO. 



LONDON 

JAMES NISBET ^ CO., LIMITED 

1904 



DAS' 



Printed by 

Ballantvne, Hanson dr' Co. 

Edinburgh 



s:}. 7,4 



*\ 



TO 

MY FATHER 

SIDNEY JAMES OWEN 

IN MEMORY OF MY 
EARLIEST HISTORICAL TRAINING 



CONTENTS 

CHAP. PAGE 

I. Queen Elizabeth i 

II. Country Life 22 

III. Sir Thomas Gresham and the Merchant 

Life of London 40 

IV. Schools and Universities .... 58 
V. Archbishop Parker : the Jesuits and In- 
dependents ^^ 

VI. Francis Bacon loi 

VII. Sir Philip Sidney . . . . . . 119 

VIII. Sir Walter Raleigh 143 

IX. Elizabethan Seamen 167 

X. The Armada : Lord Howard and Essex . 192 
XL Lord Burghley, Robert Cecil, and Sir 

Francis Walsingham 211 

XII. Spenser 232 

XI II. Marlowe 254 

XIV. Shakspere 276 



LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS 



William Shakspere .... 

Queen Elizabeth .... 

Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester 

Sir Thomas Gresham 

Francis Bacon . 

Sir Philip Sidney 

Sir Walter Raleigh 

Martin Frobisher . 

Sir Francis Drake . 

Robert Devereux, Second Earl of 

Essex 

Lord Burghley 

Edmund Spenser 



Frontispiece 
To face page i 

12 

40 
102 
120 
144 
170 
178 

204 
212 
232 




ELIZABETA D. G. ANGLI.t.FRANCIA-.HIBERKL-t.ET VERGINI.^ 
REGINA CHRISTIANAE rIDEI VNICVM TROin'G VACVL\'>I . 

Tmmc^lah' hj!Wi 'Rcimrn , cut nr.i fii.i; ,,-'j' Ovjv tr 

K^lpice ;ii4i' nuruTujm terras 'Ijah'r.trr 3^nMni,;.' Tirij- rri' 






IN SHAKSPERE'S ENGLAND 

CHAPTER I 

QUEEN ELIZABETH 

The England of Shakspere was the England of 
Elizabeth, and though in the great dramatist we 
have one whose genius has never been repeated, it 
is round the figure of the Queen that the life and 
literature of the time revolves. 

She was Spenser's Faery Queene, she was 
Raleigh's Gracious Lady, she was the centre of the 
Court where Leicester and Essex played their 
part : she shared the work of Burghley, Parker, 
and Gresham. 

Probably no woman, since the world began, 
had ever so difficult a part to play, or played it 
with such complete success ; throughout her life 
she held her people's heart, and she lives in history 
as one of the ablest rulers England has ever 
known : we must study her character and her life, 
if we would gain any idea of the England of 
Shakspere's day. 

A 



2 IN SHAKSPERE'S ENGLAND 

" The child that is born on the Sabbath Day, 
Is merry and bonny and wise and gay," 

SO runs the old rhyme, and it was on a Sunday, 
the 17th of September 1533, at Greenwich Palace, 
that the little Princess made her entry into a 
world where she had need of all her Sunday attri- 
butes. Motherless at three years old, and worse 
than fatherless, hers was indeed a tragic child- 
hood. 

First came her welcome, hardly less enthu- 
siastic outwardly than if she had been the much- 
longed for son, and her gorgeous christening as a 
babe of four days old, in the then standing church 
of the Grey Friars at Greenwich. 

The magnificent ceremony which attended the 
rite of baptism was well fitted to the after-life of 
Elizabeth, to whom all pageants were dear, and 
in whose reign they played so large a part. 

Could anything have been more appropriate to 
the future of the great Queen than the stately 
procession which heralded her christening ? 

First marched citizens, two by two, then alder- 
men, and my Lord Mayor, all clad in their civic 
robes of office ; following them came a gallant 
array of peers and prelates, and then, bearing the 
gold-covered basin, walked the Earl of Essex, a 
fitting figure in this first public appearance of 



QUEEN ELIZABETH 3 

Elizabeth, as his later namesake was to be the 
chief favourite of her declining years. 

The royal babe, wrapped in a mantle of purple 
velvet, was carried in the arms of her great-grand- 
mother, the Dowager-Duchess of Norfolk, and her 
long ermine - trimmed train was borne by the 
Countess of Kent, and the Earls of Wiltshire and 
Derby. 

At the door of the church she was welcomed 
by the chief clergy of the land, and was carried to 
the centre of the church, where stood a silver font 
beneath a gold-fringed canopy, and there she was 
baptized by the Bishop of London. 

Then onwards, to the altar, moved the stately 
procession, and the babe was there solemnly con- 
firmed by Cranmer, Archbishop of Canterbury, 
according to the ritual of the Catholic Church ; 
and the proclamation, above her head, of Garter- 
King-at-Arms, might well sound forth as a pro- 
phecy, " God, of His infinite goodness, send a 
properous life and long, to the high and mighty 
Princess of England, Elizabeth." 

Such was her first public greeting by her 
future subjects, and what could be more appro- 
priate to her after-life than this opening scene of 
crimson and gold, of costly gifts, and obsequious 
courtiers ? 



4 IN SHAKSPERE'S ENGLAND 

But the rapid changes, to which the members 
of Henry VIII.'s Court were forced to accustom 
themselves, affected the tiny Princess before her 
babyhood was well over. 

She was but three years old when her ill-fated 
mother, Anne Boleyn, was condemned to death 
upon the scaffold, leaving her daughter a heritage 
of vanity even greater than that which had cost 
her own life. 

Elizabeth's childhood was marked by many 
changes. Her position was naturally somewhat 
affected by the attitude towards her of her con- 
stantly varying stepmothers: gentle Lady Jane 
Seymour only lived a few months after the birth 
of her son Edward ; between Elizabeth and Anne 
of Cleves there existed kindly relations throughout 
their lives; while Katherine Howard, the third 
lady within four years who filled the position of 
stepmother to the young Princess, was related to 
her own mother, Anne Boleyn, and so treated 
Elizabeth with marked courtesy and consideration 
during the two years that she retained the favour 
of her fickle husband. 

With her father's last wife, Katherine Parr, 
Elizabeth was on friendly terms until some time- 
after the king's death, when the unwise conduct, 
and boisterous behaviour, of Admiral Seymour, 



QUEEN ELIZABETH 5 

Katherine's second husband, led to a breach be- 
tween the royal ladies. 

The early governesses of the orphan Princess 
were Lady Byran and Mrs. Ashley, and later she 
was entrusted to the care of the wise and pious 
Lady Tyrwhitt, to whose faithful and affectionate 
training her character owed much of its develop- 
ment. 

As a girl she occupied various royal residences, 
Hunsdone, Hatfield, and others ; and at times she 
had the companionship of her elder sister Mary, 
and of her brother Edward, her junior by four 
years ; with him her studies were largely carried 
on, under the instruction of the most learned men 
of the day. 

Her intellectual ability was above that of most 
women ; she had the love of knowledge, and the 
ease in acquiring it, more often seen in a man's 
mind than in a woman's ; and her powers of ob- 
servation and diplomacy were early trained by the 
stormy and uncertain atmosphere of the three 
Courts which preceded her own ; while the quick 
clear wit, and logical powers which she inherited 
from her father and grandfather were of the 
utmost service to her throughout her life ; and, 
indeed, had much to do with the preservation of 
that life during the reign of her sister Mary. 



6 IN SHAKSPERE'S ENGLAND 

To the shadowed childhood of Elizabeth, the 
circumstances of which afforded her so much 
leisure for the pursuit of all branches of know- 
ledge, the ladies of her time owed much ; for she 
set an example in womanly cultivation which was 
followed by many, so that it was a common thing 
for any lady at her Court to be able to converse 
in three languages. 

She was, herself, both learned and accom- 
plished ; under Roger Ascham she had studied 
Livy, Cicero, and Sophocles, and her Latin exer- 
cises, with their characteristically firm hand- 
writing, are still to be seen in the Bodleian 
Library at Oxford, together with her letters 
in the same language to her brother, for 
whom she had a strong affection. She spoke 
Latin fluently, as well as French and Italian, 
and was skilled in music and dancing, and in 
fine needlework — the last evidently at an early 
age, as the Royal Letters of the time mention 
her gift to Prince Edward, on his second 
birthday, of a cambric shirt, worked by her own 
hands. 

She also shared the theological studies so dear 
to her precocious brother, though her views must 
always have differed widely from his on matters 
of religion. He and his elder sister Mary were 



QUEEN ELIZABETH 7 

fanatics, while Henry VIII. and Elizabeth always 
regarded the Church more or less from a political 
point of view. 

Her early training had given the young Princess 
the art of avoiding dangerous subjects, and extri- 
cating herself from difficult situations, and of this 
art she had need throughout her life, and never 
more so than during the five years of her sister's 
reign. Owing to the religious difference between 
them, there was at one time a strong desire on the 
part of Queen Mary's advisers to get rid of Eliza- 
beth, as they had already done of the unfortunate 
Lady Jane Grey, and so to lessen the chances 
of England passing into the power of the New 
Religion ; and the fact that this scheme was not 
carried out was due partly to Mary's sense of 
sisterly duty and affection, but even more to 
Elizabeth's own conduct. However difficult the 
part she had to play, she played it always with 
the same ready wit and dexterity which yet none 
could call hypocrisy, and with the absolute fear- 
lessness inherent in her Tudor race. 

Whether it were in her studious life at Hatfield, 
under the care of Lady Tyrwhitt, and the tutelage 
of Roger Ascham, where, clad in Puritan sim- 
plicity, she devoted her time to such studies as 
befitted a maiden of royal rank ; or when, sum- 



8- IN SHAKSPERE'S ENGLAND 

moned post-haste to London by the Queen, to 
answer the charge of being concerned in Wyatt's 
rebellion, she was borne in a litter through the 
streets, robed in white, and pale with recent ill- 
ness ; or, while waiting for her trial, she employed 
her time in penning letters of loyalty and affection 
to her sister ; or even when, on Palm Sunday, 
she entered the Tower by the dreaded Traitors' 
Gate, with the high-souled words, " Here landeth 
as true a subject, being prisoner, as ever landed 
at these stairs, and before Thee, O God, I speak 
it, having none other friend but Thee alone," she 
was always the same, strong, clear-headed, self- 
sufficient, and she showed in each crisis her power 
of gaining that which she held all through her 
own reign, and in which, like the flowing locks of 
the Nazarite of old, her great strength lay, the 
heart of the English people. 

Her position of danger and difficulty, and her 
escape from them, is well summed up in a couplet 
said to have been scratched by her with a diamond 
on a window-pane in Woodstock Manor, while she 
was living there under the severe charge of Sir 
Henry Bedingfield — 

" Much suspected by me ; 
Nothing proved can be, 

Quoth Elizabeth, prisoner." 



QUEEN ELIZABETH 9 

The five years of Mary's reign ran their course 
in ever-deepening gloom and disappointment, and 
the end came fitly in the dreariest month of the 
year. 

On the 17th of November 1558, the pious, 
weary-hearted Queen laid down the burden of 
life, which had never been to her anything but 
grievous, and in disquiet and uncertainty began 
the reign which was to change the state of 
England, and to be remembered as one of the 
greatest and most prosperous times our country 
has ever known. 

Bishop Godwin thus speaks of the general feel- 
ing at the period of Mary's death : " The rich 
were fearful, the wise careful, the honestly-disposed 
doubtful ; the discontented and desperate were 
joyful, wishing for strife as the door for plunder." 

But the rich, the wise, and the doubtful, as 
well as those who were desperate and discon- 
tented, were all soon to find themselves united by 
common aims and common sympathies, beneath 
the rule of such able ministers as Elizabeth, from 
the first, knew how to choose, and how to keep. 

No Court of English monarch has ever been 
adorned by so many great figures, and we must 
dwell on them separately if we would catch — 
even for a moment — the spirit of that mighty age. 



lo IN SHAKSPERE'S ENGLAND 

Raleigh, with his visionary gaze fixed always be- 
yond the sea ; Bacon, yearning to bring men's minds 
to the full knowledge of his New Philosophy ; 
Spenser, touched by the fairy grace of his own 
creation ; and Sidney, the Galahad of that noble 
band ; there, too, was the great Lord Burghley, 
her faithful minister for more than forty years ; 
there were the rugged figures of the Seamen, and 
such courtly favourites as Leicester and Essex. 

And in their midst stands Elizabeth, always 
alone, in the stately isolation best suited to her 
imperious nature, which could never brook the 
sharing of her power with a husband. 

She is described by contemporary writers as of 
middle-height, graceful, and of regal bearing, with 
a fair complexion, a hooked nose, hazel eyes, and 
a broad forehead crowned with masses of fair 
reddish hair ; her hands were small, and, like 
those of Queen Victoria, beautifully shaped, and 
she lost no opportunity of displaying them ; her 
bearing was like her father's, and so was her 
manner, cheery and hearty when pleased, and 
violent when angry, distributing cuffs and caresses 
equally among her favourites, according to her 
temper at the moment, and possessed of a vanity 
even greater than that which had proved to fatal 
to her unhappy mother. 



QUEEN ELIZABETH ii 

Gallantry, under Elizabeth, became a profes- 
sion ; her Court was filled with young men of 
noble and gentle birth, in whom promise of any 
kind usually met with recognition ; thither they 
came, and there they were retained, to bask in the 
somewhat capricious smiles of the Virgin Queen, 
who loved to have all men at her feet, and who 
exacted from her courtiers a lover-like demeanour, 
and a fictitious personal devotion even to the year 
of her death at the age of seventy-two. 

But, in spite of this weaker side to her nature, 
Elizabeth was the true daughter of Henry VOL, 
and to no man was she prepared to yield "the 
half of her kingdom " ; where policy came in, her 
affections could always be made to draw back, her 
heart was never allowed to govern her head. 

Nowhere is she better described than in the 
words which Sir Walter Scott puts into the mouth 
of the Earl of Leicester : "/ 1 think God, when He 
gave her the heart of a woman, gave her the head 
of a man to control its follies. . . . She will accept 
love-tokens, — ay, and answer them too, — push 
gallantry to the very verge where it becomes 
exchange of affection, — but she writes nil ultra to 
all which is to follow, and would not barter one 
iota of her supreme power for all the alphabet of 
both Cupid and Hymen." 



12 IN SHAKSPERE'S ENGLAND 

Her early life had not been such as to en- 
courage or develop natural affections ; bereft of 
her mother by her father's command, imprisoned, 
and almost condemned to death by her sister, and 
continually separated from all those for whom 
she cared, repression of her feelings must have 
become a habit. Then had come her first, and 
perhaps her deepest, love-affair, that with Admiral 
Seymour, who wooed her in a somewhat boisterous 
fashion when she was only sixteen years old. But 
the trouble which this attachment and Seymour's 
ambition brought about, her own danger and dis- 
grace, and the Admiral's death upon the block, 
gave her such a terrible warning against royal 
ladies indulging in private affections, that she 
seemed to take the lesson to heart for life. 

The best beloved among her Court favourites 
was, without doubt, Robert Dudley, Earl of 
Leicester, and she seemed at one time intent 
on making him her husband. 

He was the son of the Duke of Northumberland, 
and brother of the unfortunate Guildford Dudley, 
whose fate as Prince-Consort might well have 
deterred Robert from seeking the same position. 

Robert was a man of unusual personal beauty, 
tall and graceful, with finely-cut features, and 
keen dark eyes, and skilled in all knightly accom- 




// 'alker &^ CockercU 

Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester 



QUEEN ELIZABETH 13 

plishments of the time ; but he was entirely 
wanting in true nobility of mind, he was arro- 
gant, self-seeking, and lacking in sincerity, and he 
would have made but a sorry Prince-Consort had 
Elizabeth ever raised him to the position for 
which he longed : saving that, she showed him 
every mark of royal favour. 

He was constantly beside her at the feasts 
and pageants which she loved, when she indulged 
in her favourite sports of hunting or hawking, 
or was rowed in her barge from London to the 
palace at Greenwich where she had been born, 
and which she always favoured as a residence. 

But even from Leicester she would allow no 
act of presumption ; when he had interfered 
with a royal usher, so as to gain admittance 
for one of his followers into her presence, her 
rebuke, in spite of her affection for him, was 
sharp and significant. 

" My lord," she said, " I have wished you well, 
but my favour is not so locked up for you that 
others shall not partake thereof ; for I have many 
servants, to whom I have, and will at my pleasure 
bequeath my favour, and likewise resume the 
same ; and if you think to rule here, I will take 
a course to see you forthcoming. I will have but 
one mistress, and no master," 



14 IN SHAKSPERE'S ENGLAND 

But vain, haughty, and unscrupulous as he 
was, Robert Dudley kept the Queen's affection 
to the day of his death, which took place fifteen 
years before her own ; their birthday was said to 
have been the same. 

Though Dudley had her affection, Elizabeth 
carried on, for political purposes, negotiations of 
marriage with foreign princes ; but into their ex- 
periences, while engaged in the difficult process of 
wooing the Virgin Queen, we need not enter. 

Besides these royal suitors, her Court was filled 
with her " Royal Pensioners," young men of 
gentle birth, who basked in the somewhat variable 
light of her smiles, and used her favour as much 
as possible to their own advantage ; they were 
always ready to offer the adoring homage which 
she exacted, and their influence, based on any- 
thing but moral worth, often greatly interfered 
with the counsels of her more serious advisers. 

One of the methods by which Elizabeth in- 
creased her popularity, and also saved her private 
purse, was her habit of making royal progresses 
through different parts of her kingdom, being 
always the guest of some highly-favoured noble, 
who had the privilege of providing the most 
costly series of entertainments in her honour. 

At none of these visits was she treated with 



QUEEN ELIZABETH 15 

more regal splendour than during the three weeks, 
in 1575, that she spent at Kenilworth Castle, as 
the guest of the Earl of Leicester. 

Into all the festivities was introduced the 
element of personal devotion and admiration 
which Elizabeth so dearly loved. The Earl 
himself, at the head of a noble retinue, met 
and escorted her to the castle-gate ; there she 
was received by a giant porter, who, in halt- 
ing speech, declared his intention of guarding 
the entrance with his club against all comers. 
But, on seeing the Queen, his attitude changed, 
he flung his weapon away, and himself on his 
knees before her, and presented to her his keys 
of office. 

Then, as the party advanced to the moat, they 
beheld a floating island, whereon stood a lovely 
maiden clothed in silk, and decked with golden 
bracelets on her bare wrists and ankles ; attended 
by two nymphs she knelt before the Queen, and 
told her tale in the somewhat lengthy verse of the 
period. She had been Lady of the Lake, she 
said, ever since the great days of King Arthur, 
and in her crystal palace she had nursed the 
gallant Sir Lancelot ; and there she had dwelt 
unmoved while Saxons, Normans, Mountforts, 
and Plantagenets had each in their turn inhabited 



1 6 IN SHAKSPERE'S ENGLAND 

the castle ; but now, at last, one had come to 
the gates before whose fame and beauty she too 
must bow ; and so she had risen from her home 
beneath the water to do homage to the Peerless 
Queen. 

And the same story was told throughout the 
castle and the grounds : whether in the decora- 
tions, beautiful or grotesque, in the music, or in 
the speeches, sometimes in Latin and sometimes 
in English, everywhere was expressed the same 
boundless admiration for the person, the character, 
and the wisdom of Elizabeth. 

When she rode in the park, a Wild Man of the 
Woods met her, and flinging himself at her feet, 
declared that the mere sight of so fair a vision, 
made him willing at once to renounce his savage 
way of life. 

When a pleasure-party rowed upon the lake, 
the very fishes were made to sound her praise on 
various musical instruments, with Arion, on his 
dolphin, at their head ; and so magnificent were 
the fireworks displayed in her honour, that Robert 
Laneham writes, "The heavens thundered, the 
waters surged, and the earth shook ; and for my 
part, hardy as I am, it made me vengeably afraid." 

Such was the form of entertainment which 
Elizabeth approved, and serious was the expense 



QUEEN ELIZABETH 17 

it involved upon the nobleman with whom she 
might elect to stay during one of these royal 
progresses ; for, besides having no option in the 
matter of receiving her, he rarely had more 
than a few days' notice of her coming, and so 
was often in great straits as to the needful pre- 
parations. 

In this way she travelled, in the course of her 
reign, throughout a large part of England, and 
many are the interesting records that remain in 
town and country of these various royal journeys. 

On her visit to Norwich a characteristic inci- 
dent took place, which showed her well-known 
love of money. 

At the entrance of the town she was welcomed 
by the mayor, in a carefully prepared Latin 
speech, and he ended it by presenting her with 
a silver cup filled with gold pieces ; " Sunt hie 
centum libras puri auri," said the mayor, and the 
Queen, before making any recognition of the 
welcoming oration, took off the cover and looked 
eagerly inside, then handed the cup to a servant, 
saying with a smile, " Look to it ; there is a 
hundred pound." 

In August 1564 she visited Cambridge, and 
two years later, in the same month, she went to 
Oxford, and at both her Universities she was re- 

B 



i8- IN SHAKSPERE'S ENGLAND 

ceived and entertained in a thoroughly academical 
manner. 

At Cambridge the master of King's College, as 
Public Orator, greeted her in a Latin speech of 
three quarters of an hour, delivered upon his 
knees. At his excessive praise of her virtues, the 
Queen bit her fingers, and shook her head, ex- 
claiming, " Non est Veritas," but when he went on 
to praise virginity, she cried out, " God's blessing 
on thy heart, there continue." 

On Sunday she attended the service in King's 
College Chapel, and was escorted thither by four 
doctors of divinity, who held a canopy of state 
above her head. 

She praised the Latin sermon ; she conversed 
in that language with young scholars in the 
colleges and streets, seeming to enjoy the exercise 
of her mental powers ; and we are told that, 
among her many criticisms of University matters, 
was a highly unfavourable one upon the ragged 
and soiled condition of many of the academical 
gowns and hoods. Could her spirit walk again 
the streets of Oxford and Cambridge, she would 
doubtless see good reason for a repetition of her 
words ! 

She bade farewell to Cambridge in a well- 
prepared Latin oration, though feigning maiden 



QUEEN ELIZABETH 19 

modesty and want of preparation, she answered 
the enthusiastic applause with which her words 
were greeted, by wishing that her hearer "had 
drank of Lethe." 

Two years later she entered Oxford, by way of 
Woodstock and Wolvercote, and at the latter village 
she was met by Leicester, who was Chancellor of 
the University, and a learned band of doctors of 
divinity in their scarlet robes. She listened with 
interest to the speech of the Public Orator, but 
when Dr, Humphreys, the great Puritan leader 
drew near, she greeted him with the famous 
words, " Mr. Doctor, that loose gown becomes 
you mighty well ; I wonder your notions should 
be so narrow." 

Among other entertainments provided for her 
in Oxford, was a play called "Palamon and Arcite," 
by Richard Edwards, enacted in Christ Church 
Hall, and in which the heroine was clad in robes 
lent for the occasion, which had belonged to the 
late Queen Mary. 

The heroine's part was played by a lad of 
fourteen, whose good looks so pleased Elizabeth 
that she bestowed upon him the sum of eight 
pounds. The borrowed robe was of purple velvet, 
with a satin ground, and seemed to have suffered 
somewhat from its academical use, as it was re- 



20 - IN SHAKSPERE'S ENGLAND 

turned to the wardrobe officials with a valuable 
portion missing ! 

In St. Mary's Church the Queen heard learned 
disputations ; and there she was greatly displeased 
with a certain Dr. Westphaling, who spoke at such 
length that her own oration was obliged to be 
postponed until the next day ; even though — with 
manners more regal than academic — she sent a 
messenger to bid him, " make an end of his dis- 
course without delay." 

She spent a week in Oxford, and made her final 
farewell to the University in a Greek oration, 
receiving as a parting present six fine pairs of 
gloves for her own use, and others for members of 
her household. 

She had a passion for receiving presents, and 
her courtiers and ladies constantly made her offer- 
ings of gold and silver jewelry, and garments 
wonderfully embroidered in silk and lace. Her love 
of dress, and of elaborate toilettes, seemed to grow 
with her years ; no material could be too rich, no 
jewels too precious, with which to deck her person, 
and she never allowed herself to be seen, even by 
her intimate friends, except elaborately attired. 

Her pictures are well known ; she usually ap- 
pears in them attired in the close-fitting head- 
dress of the time, surmounted by a mass of jewels. 



QUEEN ELIZABETH 21 

the lace ruffle, stiffened until it adds an unnatural 
width to the shoulders, and a dress as rich and 
rare as skill can produce, and of which probably 
she possessed a greater number than any woman 
who has ever lived. 

Such was Elizabeth, a grand human figure, with 
the grandeur of one who recognised from the first 
her part in Hfe, and played it successfully to the 
end ; and yet human in the yearning for love and 
admiration which seemed to grow with her years. 

Her lonely isolation weighed increasingly upon 
her, until it reached its pathetic end in the death- 
bed scene, in March 1603. 

" Robin, I am not well," she said to her kinsman 
Sir Robert Carey, who found her stretched among 
cushions on the floor of her chamber. 

There were none to watch with clinging affec- 
tion round the bed to which at last they carried 
her, so sorely against her will ; and though her 
faithful ministers and loyal friends, her ladies-in- 
waiting, and the good Archbishop of Canterbury, 
all did their part in aiding her to make ready for 
that last great royal progress, still they were all far 
from her in race and station ; and in the early 
dawn of that chill March morning, alone, as she 
had lived, the spirit of the mighty Queen Elizabeth 
passed to its rest. 



CHAPTER II 

COUNTRY LIFE 

During the reign of Elizabeth, English social life 
underwent an entire change. Men ceased to live 
in the stormy atmosphere of political intrigue or 
religious controversy to which they had become 
accustomed ; peace and prosperity settled down on 
the land, and the beginnings were established of 
that comfortable country life throughout England 
which endures to our own day. 

The country gentleman, freed from the duty of 
spending himself and his substance in warfare 
either political or religious, could now live on his 
own land, and turn his attention to the improve- 
ment of his property, and the greater comfort of 
himself and his family. 

Houses could now be built more with a view to 
convenience, than to fortification, and so there 
arose many stately homes which still bear record 
to the style of Elizabethan architecture. The 
ordinary houses of the country gentlemen were 
still built usually of wood, of two storeys, thatched 



COUNTRY LIFE 23 

with straw or slate, and with the modern glass 
window taking the place of the horn or lattice of 
earlier days. But some people were beginning 
already to have their houses " wrought of bricke or 
hard stone, with roomes large and comelie, and 
houses of office further distant from their lodgings." 
Men were beginning also to understand more 
what comfort and cleanliness meant inside their 
houses. Carpets were now constantly used, and 
rich hangings, as well as good feather beds and 
pillows, instead of the dirty rushes renewed per- 
haps but once a year, the straw pallet and " good 
round log " which formerly did duty as a pillow. 
Meals were beginning to be served upon fine 
table linen, and in glass and pewter vessels, with 
silver plate and silver spoons ; while knives and 
forks generally took the place of the more primi- 
tive fingers ! In the houses of the rich drinks 
were served in goblets, jugs, and bowls of silver 
or Venetian glass, while the less wealthy drank 
from earthern pots sometimes ornamented in 
silver ; these were not set on the table, but each 
man called for " such drinke as him listeth to 
have : so that when he hath tasted of it, he 
delivered the cup againe to some one of the 
standers by, who making it cleane [by pouring out 
the drinke that remaineth] restoreth it to the 



24 " IN SHAKSPERE'S ENGLAND 

cupbord." From which it is evident that the 
method of " washing up " was still in a primitive 
state. That the difficulty as to breakages existed 
even then is plain when we hear that the glass in 
household use all goes " one waie, that is to shards 
at the last," and that " our great expenses in 
glasses breed much strife toward such as have 
the charge of them." 

Men usually took two meals in the day, dinner 
and supper ; the nobles and gentlefolk dined at 
eleven and supped at five, the merchants dined at 
noon and supped at six, and the agricultural classes 
dined at twelve, but did not sup till seven or eight 
o'clock. 

The tables of all but the poorest seem to have 
been well filled, and foreign visitors at the time 
marvelled to see what Englishmen did eat. Fish, 
fowl, and meat, prepared in the houses of noble- 
men by cooks who are, for the most part " musi- 
call-headed Frenchmen and strangers," not only 
beef and mutton, but red and fallow deer, pork 
and veal, with kid and conie, and various kinds 
of foreign game. 

They baked their meat with suet, or roasted it 
and basted it with sweet or salt butter, and their 
cooks were famous for the brawn which they 
made, and served constantly as a first course at 



COUNTRY LIFE 25 

dinner. This was so essentially an English dish, 
and unknown on the Continent, that we are told 
of a Catholic gentleman of France to whom was 
sent the gift of a cask of brawn made from the 
tame boar, and who " supposing it to be fish, re- 
served it till Lent, at which time he did eat 
thereof with very great frugalitie." 

Of wheaten bread there were three kinds, of 
which the best was called manchet, and this was 
chiefly eaten by the richer folk, while, owing to 
the high price of corn, the poor had to be content 
to make bread out of rye, barley, beans, oats, or 
acorns. 

The vegetables they used were the same as 
ours, and doubtless the French cooks, " musicall- 
headed " though they were, did something towards 
the improvement in their preparation and cooking. 
In kitchen gardens, we are told, were grown all 
kinds of cabbage, with leeks, onions, peas — or 
peason as the plural was then — beans, artichokes, 
turnips, radishes, lettuces, and beets, with garlic, 
endive, rue, and all manner of herbs which were 
used both in cooking, and still more in the manu- 
facture of home-made physic. Rhubarb, for in- 
stance, seems only to have been used at that time 
as a medicine, and as thai very largely. 

The following quaint rhymes of the time, 



26 IN SHAKSPERE'S ENGLAND 

translated from the Latin, show how much certain 
plants were valued for their supposed efficacy 
against disease or poison : — 

" Garlick, Rue, Peares, and Radish also, 
With Nuts Hkewise and Treacle, 
A sov'reigne medcine to us do show, 
Against deadly poyson an obstacle." 

" Sage and with it herbe of Grace or Rue, 
Make drinks both safe and sound for you." 

Here is a lotion wherewith to bathe weak eyes : — 

"And better with greene Fennel] juice, and of a cocke the 
gall,_ 
And honie, if the juice thereof alike be put of all, 
And with it oft the patients eies annointing suffer shall." 

And the following, relating to rue, ascribes a 
high standard of intelligence to the Elizabethan 
weezel : — 

"And Weezels teach it can withstand strong poysons spite, 
Which when they are about with serpents blacke to fight, 
In wondrous sort do first of all, Rue nibble eat and bite." 

Of fruit there had always been plenty in 
England, though, at this time, many of the 
orchards of Kent were turned into the hop-gardens 
they still remain, for the improvement of the beer 
which was the chief drink of the country. 

Grapes they cultivated more at that time than 
we do now, and they were fond of flavouring their 
dishes with berries of different kinds. 



COUNTRY LIFE 27 

Of the berry of the pimpernel rose we are 
told " the fruit when it is ripe maketh most pleasant 
meats and banketting dishes, as Tartes and such like : 
the making whereof I commit to the cunning Cooke, 
and the teeth to eate them in the rich man's mouth." 

And the root of the wild rose was said to be 
" a singular remedie (found out by oracle) against 
the biting of a mad dog." 

English drinks were nearly as varied then as in 
our own day. They had wine, both foreign and 
home-grown, and beer, of which the contemporary 
traveller Hentzner writes, " The general drink is 
beer, which is prepared from barley, and is ex- 
cellently well tasted, but strong, and what soon 
fuddles." There were many home-made beverages 
too, such as cider, perrie, and mead ; the last 
seemed a favourite drink in some parts of the 
country, though its description hardly sounds 
" tasty " in modern ears ! " There is a kind of 
swish-swash made also in Essex, and divers other 
places, with honicombs and water, which the 
countrie wives, putting some pepper and a little 
other spice among, call mead." 

Such were the various materials from which the 
great banquets of the time were constructed, and 
such was the household food, day by day, of 
Queen Elizabeth and her subjects. 



28 IN SHAKSPERE'S ENGLAND 

Besides the cultivation of fruit and vegetables, 
and even flowers for the sake of provisions, there 
were beautiful pleasure gardens belonging to large 
and small country houses, where flowers were 
grown in great profusion, both for beauty and for 
medicinal purposes. 

The rose, the lily, and the iris, or flower-de- 
luce, as it was then called, were cultivated in very 
many varieties, and the " jacint " or hyacinth had 
lately been imported from the East. Many of the 
beautiful delicate garden poppies, so fashionable 
of late years in our own gardens, were growing 
then, and tended then as now by the ladies of the 
household ; double scarlet and double purple, as 
well as double black and white, and besides these, 
many forms of the single and much more elegant 
variety, of which we find mention made of both 
black and white. They also grew the various 
orchids, of which fourteen kinds are illustrated in 
a " Herbal of the Time " by Gerard, who was for 
more than twenty years head gardener to Lord 
Burghley. Of tulips he says, "Tulipa groweth 
wilde in Thracia, Cappadocia, Italic ; in Bizantia 
about Constantinople, at Tripolis and Alepo in 
Syria, from whence I have received plants for my 
garden, and likewise Master Garth, a worshipfull 
gentleman, and Master James Garret, apothecarie 



COUNTRY LIFE 29 

also for their gardens, where they flourish and 
increase, as in their owne native countrey." 

The land was rich then, as now, in private 
parks, where the great men of the day kept their 
herds of deer, and did not hesitate to sell their 
venison ; while even well-born country ladies were 
not above making a profit on their butter and 
other dairy produce. 

The countryman, of whatever rank, was then 
as now proud of his horses, and of his home- 
grown live-stock, his cattle, sheep, and pigs, while 
dogs of all kinds formed a part of mostlhouseholds. 

There were the " dogs of the homelie kind, 
shepheards curs or mastififes, so common that it 
needeth not to speak of them," and the dogs 
trained to bait bears and bulls, "and oftentimes 
they traine them up in fighting and wrestling with 
a man (having for the safegard of his life either a 
pike staffe, club, sword, privie coate) whereby they 
become the more fierce and cruell unto strangers." 
There were the game-dogs, too, the land-spaniels 
and water-spaniels, and the tiny toy Maltese dogs, 
which were the petted playthings of many ladies 
of the time, who would "keepe companie withall 
in their chambers, and nourish with meat at 
boord." 

The dress of the time is not easy to describe, as 



30 IN SHAKSPERE'S ENGLAND 

the fashions varied, then as now, from year to 
year, and were borrowed from other countries, 
chiefly France and Spain. The Queen's intense 
love of dress influenced the Court, and through it 
the rest of the land ; so that men and women alike 
thought nothing too costly or too extravagant for 
the adornment of their persons. And this love of 
change and extravagance is nowhere better illus- 
trated, than in a quaint old woodcut of the 
time,^ showing a gentleman in the state of nature, 
with a pair of colossal scissors in one hand, and a 
piece of cloth in the other, endeavouring to make 
up his mind after what style to fashion his suit. 
And his supposed utterance is no less charmingly 
characteristic of the time : — 

" I am an English man, and naked I stand here, 
Musing in my mynde what rayment I shal were ; 
For now I wyll were thys, and now I wyl were that ; 
Now I wyl were I cannot tel what. 
All new fashyons be pleasant to me ; 
I wyl have them, whether I thryve or thee." 

As the chronicler tells us, Andrew Boorde en- 
deavoured to write of " our attire," but that " when 
he saw what a difficult peece of worke he had taken 
in hand, he gave over his travell, and onelie drue 
the picture of a naked man, unto whome he gave 
a paire of sheares in the one hand, and a peece of 

^ In Andrew Boorde's " Introduction and Dyetary." 



COUNTRY LIFE 31 

cloth in the other, to the end he should shape his 
apparell after such fashion as himselfe liked, sith 
he could find no kind of garment that could please 
him anie while togither ; and this he called an 
Englishman." 

Elizabeth, of course, is famous for the number 
and magnificence of her dresses, of which she left 
over three thousand in her wardrobes at her death, 
and from her pictures we are familiar with their 
elaborate and costly make. 

During her reign the close-fitting tight-sleeved 
dresses which had been worn by English women 
gradually gave place to far more elaborate and ex- 
pensive attire. The dresses came to be worn over 
hoops, and padded and stuffed so that they could 
stand alone, and the consequent width of the skirt 
was almost equalled by the size of the Spanish 
ruffe round the neck ; this was made of fine lawn 
or lace, laid on wire, and stiffened by the lately 
invented starch, which the Puritans called "the 
Devil's liquor." 

Instead of the close-fitting round cap of earlier 
days, the hair was now worn in the most extrava- 
gant fashions. . Curled, frizzled, and puffed ; deco- 
rated with jewels, gold, and other ornaments, and 
even " propped by forks and wire." 

The dress of men was also more costly than at 



32 IN SHAKSPERE'S ENGLAND 

any other time, if one may take as a specimen the 
attire in which Sir Walter Scott describes the Earl 
of Leicester receiving Elizabeth at Kenilworth : 
" The favourite earl was now apparelled all in white, 
his shoes being of white velvet ; his understocks 
(or stockings) of knit silk ; his upper stocks of 
white velvet, lined with cloth of silver, which was 
shown at the slashed part of the middle thigh ; his 
doublet of cloth of silver, the close jerkin of white 
velvet, embroidered with silver and seed-pearl, his 
girdle and the scabbard of his sword of white 
velvet with golden buckles ; his poniard and sword 
hilted and mounted with gold ; and over all a rich 
loose robe of white satin, with a border of golden 
embroidery a foot in breadth." 

On ordinary occasions men wore short coats, 
trunk hose, padded as stiffly as the ladies' dresses, 
worked stockings, boots with long pointed toes, 
and cloaks of some rich material, usually lined 
with silk or velvet, while their heads were covered 
with many shaped hats, of silk, cloth, or velvet. 

Of the elegance of the ladies' toilettes a good idea 
may be gained by studying the various New Year's 
gifts which the Queen accepted from her friends 
and the ladies of her household : " A night-coif of 
cambric cut work and spangles, with forehead-cloth 
and a night border of cut work, edgecj with bone- 



COUNTRY LIFE 33 

lace ; " this bone-lace was made of various coloured 
silks, intertwined with gold and silver thread. 

Handkerchiefs , too, were offered of " black 
Spanish work," and " Handkerchiefs of cambric 
edged with passament " — is this the passementerie 
of our own day ? — " of gold and silver." " A 
night-rail," or night-dress, " of cambric, worked 
all over with black silk," and from Sir Philip Sidney 
a "smock made of cambric, the sleeves and collar 
wrought with black silk work, and edged with a 
small bone-lace of gold and silver, and a suite of 
ruffs of cut work, flourished with gold and silver, 
and set with spangles containing four ounces of 
gold ; " while Sir Francis Drake presented her with, 
'< A fan of feathers, white and red, enamelled with 
a half-moon of mother-o'-pearl, within that a half- 
moon garnished with sparks of diamonds and a few 
seed pearls on the one side, having her Majesty's 
picture within it, and on the reverse a device with 
a crow over it." 

The women of the day, according to a German 
traveller, " dress in splendid stuffs, and many a one 
wears three cloth gowns or petticoats, one over the 
other. They go dressed out," he says, " in ex- 
ceedingly fine clothes, and give all their attention 
to their ruffs and stuffs, . . . and many a one does 
not hesitate to wear velvet in the street." This is 

C 



34 IN SHAKSPERE'S ENGLAND 

perhaps the somewhat prejudiced view which a 
foreign gentleman might take of the expenditure 
of ladies abroad, but it gives us a good picture of 
an Elizabethan lady to match the white-velvet clad 
Earl of Leicester. 

Along with the greater comfort in every-day life, 
and the increased care and magnificence shown in 
dress, the pleasures and amusements of all classes 
seem to have steadily advanced, and, freed in a 
great measure as the country was from civil 
dissension or foreign invasion, it fitly merited 
in Shakspere's time the title of " Merrie Eng- 
land." 

Hunting and hawking were favourite pastimes, 
in which both men and women took part ; bear- 
baiting also and bull-baiting were popular, and 
the rearing of dogs for the purpose a matter of 
pride with some men. Dancing was a favourite 
amusement, and there were many out-of-door 
fetes and entertainments, at which regular dances 
were performed and pageants acted, such as the 
Morris dancers, Robin Hood and Maid Marian, 
and some of the Morality and Miracle Plays. 
In the country the Church festivals of Christmas, 
Easter, Candlemas, and the like were celebrated 
with quaint old pageants, full of mystic meaning, 
which drew together the countryside, and gave 



COUNTRY LIFE 35 

a feeling of common interest to all classes who 
witnessed them. 

The May Queen, and in a few parts of 
England the Mummers, are all that the Puritan 
reformers have left us of these picturesque and 
old-world fetes, and we have instead to endure 
the inartistic and unedifying commemoration 
which takes place on each 5th of November ! 

Here is a pretty and homelike description of 
a Berkshire Harvest-home; "As we were re- 
turning to our inn we happened to meet some 
country people celebrating their Harvest-home ; their 
last load of corn they crown with flowers, having 
besides an image richly dressed, by which, per- 
haps, they would signify Ceres ; this they keep 
moving about, while men and women, men and 
maid servants, riding through the streets in the 
cart, shout as loud as they can till they arrive 
at the barn." 

And another traveller gives a delightful account 
of the pleasant entertainment provided both for 
man and beast at the country inn of the time, 
" even in a very poore village." 

" The World," he says, " aff oords not such 
Innes as England hath, either for good and 
cheape entertainment after the Guests owne 
pleasure, or for humble attendance on pas- 



36 IN SHAKSPERE'S ENGLAND 

sengers." One can fancy the scene as he draws 
it. " As sone as a passenger comes to an Inne, 
the servants run to him, and one takes his horse 
and walkes him till he be cold, then rubs him 
and gives him meate, yet I must say that they 
are not much to be trusted in this last point, 
without the eye of the Master or his servant to 
oversee them. Another servant gives the pas- 
senger his private chamber, and kindles his fier ; 
the third puis of his bootes, and makes them 
cleane. Then the Host or Hostesse visit him ; 
and if he will eate with the Host, or at a 
common table with others, his meale will cost 
him sixe pence, or in some places but foure pence 
(yet this course is less honourable, and not used 
by Gentlemen) ; but if he will eate in his 
chamber, he commands what meate he will, 
according to his appetite, and as much as he 
thinkes fit for him and his company, yea, the 
Kitchin is open to him, to command the meat 
to be dressed as he best likes ; and when he 
sits at Table, the Host or Hostesse will accom- 
pany him, or, if they have many Guests, will at 
least visit him, taking it for curtesie to be bid 
to sit downe ; while he eates, if he have com- 
pany especially, he shall be offred musicke, 
which he may freely take or refuse ; and if he 



COUNTRY LIFE 37 

be solitary, the miisitians will give him the good 
day with musicke in the morning. It is the 
custome, and no way disgraceful!, to set up part 
of supper for his breakfast. In the evening, or 
in the morning after breakfast, ... he shall have 
a reckoning in vi^riting, and if it seeme unreason- 
able, the Host will satisfie him either for the 
due price, or by abating part, especially if the 
servant deceive him any way, which one of 
experience will soone find." 

This seems to show a country-inn life quite 
equal in comfort to that of our own day, and 
with a host more ready than now to ** abate " 
part of the " reckoning in writing," and " to set 
up part of supper for breakfast ! " 

The women seem to have had a pleasant and 
easy life at that time ; the Queen had set a high 
standard of chivalrous behaviour, which had, no 
doubt, its effect throughout the land. 

Women were no longer mere household drudges, 
or kept in strict seclusion, as they still were in 
Spain. "They go to market," writes a Dutch 
traveller in England, " to buy what they like best 
to eat. They are well dressed, and fond of taking 
it easy. ... In all banquets and feasts they are 
shown the greatest honour. . . . The rest of their 
time they employ in walking and riding, in playing 



38 IN SHAKSPERE'S ENGLAND 

at cards or otherwise, in visiting their equals 
(whom they term gossips), and making merry 
with them at christenings, churchings, and 
funerals." 

And of the men the same traveller writes, 
"They excell in dancing and music, for they are 
active and lively. . . . Hawking is the general 
sport of the gentry. They are more polite in 
eating than the French, devouring less bread, but 
more meat, which they roast to perfection. They 
put a great deal of sugar in their drink. Their 
beds are covered with tapestry, even those of 
farmers. . . . They are powerful in the field, 
successful against their enemies, impatient of any- 
thing like slavery ; vastly fond of great noises that 
fill the ear, such as the firing of cannon, drums, 
and the ringing of bells. ... If they see a 
foreigner very well made, or particularly hand- 
some, they will say, ' // t's a pity he is not an 
Englishman.^ " 

The irony of the last touch is delightful. 

Travelling from place to place in England was 
still a matter of difficulty, and of some danger. 
Journeys were usually made on horseback, though 
coaches and carriages were beginning to be 
employed by the more luxurious and wealthy. 
All men, even the clergy, still carried arms when 



COUNTRY LIFE 39 

they went abroad, pistols, swords, or short daggers, 
and they frequently had need of them. 

The new Poor Laws, of which we speak else- 
where, had done much to diminish the bands 
of sturdy beggars who, until lately, had infested 
the land ; but, though fewer in number, they 
still existed, wandering about the country, the 
forerunners of the " tramp " of our own day ; 
a class who prefers to beg rather than work, and 
whom probably even the most ideal Poor Laws will 
never quite succeed in merging into the Working 
Classes. 

Such was country life in England at the time of 
Shakspere ; prosperous, cheery, unrefined, full of 
new industries and new interests, due partly to 
that New World just opening to English view ; 
and at the same time bearing so strong a likeness 
to the country life of our own day, that we can 
almost fancy ourselves sitting with the Great Man 
himself before the little timbered house in the 
village street at Stratford, enjoying a drink of 
" the beer that fuddles " from the unwashed silver 
jug ! 



CHAPTER III 

SIR THOMAS GRESHAM AND THE MERCHANT 
LIFE OF LONDON 

The chief figure of commercial London during 
the earher years of Shakspere was Sir Thomas 
Gresham, who was in turn financial agent to all 
the three children of Henry VIII. He was the 
second son of Sir Richard Gresham, who had been 
Lord Mayor of London, and he was born in 
London about the year 15 19. 

His father had been wealthy, and Thomas re- 
ceived a good education, going to Gonville and 
Caius College, Cambridge, after leaving school, 
and subsequently becoming a student at Gray's 
Inn. 

But what was of far greater importance to him 
than such studies as he took part in at Gray's Inn, 
was the apprenticeship which he served on leaving 
Cambridge, to his uncle, Sir John Gresham, who 
was in partnership with his father as financial 
agent to the Government. 

Young Thomas Gresham seemed a man well 



SIR THOMAS GRESHAM 41 

suited by his natural abilities to succeed in com- 
mercial matters, especially in an age when the 
standard of business morality was not lofty. He 
was shrewd, quick-witted, self-reliant, and per- 
severing ; he saw his opportunity, as did others 
in different spheres of life, in that golden age of 
promise, and he was capable of seizing the 
chances offered him, and developing them to their 
fullest extent. 

As agent to the Crown of England in the 
Netherlands, for some years of his life Gresham 
lived in Antwerp during the greater part of each 
year, and the energy and devotion he showed in 
the carrying out of his business, both in London 
and Antwerp, could not be better witnessed to in 
the eyes of most people, than by the fact that 
during the first two years in which he was carry- 
ing on his work he made the passage of the Eng- 
lish Channel forty times. 

Lord Burghley, Elizabeth's minister, was a friend 
of Gresham's, and this largely increased the power 
of his position after the Queen's accession. He 
had, by that time, a fine house of his own in the 
Long New Street of Antwerp, where he seems to 
have entertained both his friends and his business 
clients in royal style. All money, at that time, 
must be multiplied by eight, to give its relative 



42 IN SHAKSPERE'S ENGLAND 

value in our own day, and ^26 at that time 
was Gresham's entry in his expenses for one of 
his banquets in Antwerp, given to the creditors of 
the Crown, and of which banquet a large picture 
was painted. 

It was to Gresham that a great deal of the 
credit is due of the restoring the then debased 
coinage in the time of Elizabeth ; this was a diffi- 
cult matter to carry out, and had to be done 
slowly, but it did more than anything else to raise 
the standard of English trade, especially abroad. 

Gresham was Financial Agent to Elizabeth, as 
he had been to her brother and sister, and in 
1559 she knighted him on account of his valuable 
services. His business was to negotiate loans for 
the Crown, and also to arrange for the export 
from the Netherlands to England of certain goods, 
especially arms and ammunition, of which the 
Queen had great need at one time of her reign. 

We are told that he also brought over for his 
friends such foreign delicacies as salt-tongues and 
Bologna sausages ; and also for the Queen herself 
such a suitable offering as " rollers for her head- 
gear." Gresham's salary was at the rate of ^i a 
day, together with large allowances for expenses, 
the rent of his house in Antwerp, and payment 
for four clerks to assist him in his work. Besides 



SIR THOMAS GRESHAM 43 

this, his profit from the loans he negotiated was 
enormous, and, in some cases at least, not come by 
in the most scrupulous manner. His power of 
seeing at once what conduct to pursue under any 
circumstances was what gave him his unique 
position ; the Crown trusted him, and he proved 
himself valuable as a servant of the Crown, and 
trustworthy up to a certain point, but he did not 
allow himself to be put in the wrong, even by his 
political superiors. 

Such proved to be the case in 1574, when 
Gresham produced his accounts for the last eleven 
years before the Treasury, and found the huge 
sums which he represented as owing to himself 
questioned in every detail. After much comparing 
of items on either side, Gresham was declared to 
be ;^i8,i49, IS. 9|d. to the bad. He reduced 
this deficit to ^^1400, by boldly claiming extrava- 
gant allowances on various items. These the 
Treasury refused to grant. 

But Gresham was a diplomatist, as well as a 
financier. He hied him to the official auditor, 
whom he found about to start on a holiday — and 
who does not know the compliant frame of mind 
of any one in that position ? From him he got a 
duplicate of his official account, his papers being 
all in the keeping of the auditor, and when that 



44 IN SHAKSPERE'S ENGLAND 

gentleman had started on his trip, Gresham caused 
a footnote to be added to the document, giving 
him the further expenses which the Treasury had 
refused to grant. 

With this in his pocket he set off for Kenilworth, 
where the Queen was being royally entertained 
by the best-beloved of her many admirers. And 
again, what more favourable opportunity could 
be chosen for asking grace of a lady ? The 
moment was well judged, the all-powerful Leicester 
was on his side, and in consideration of his former 
services his accounts were passed, and he returned 
to London triumphant. 

His employment of his wealth is perhaps a 
more edifying theme than the acquisition of it. 
His name will ever be held in honour among all 
London city magnates as that of the Founder of 
the Royal Exchange. His father, Sir Richard, 
had planned such a building, but, as was the 
case with another and a greater building, and 
an earlier father and son, the father conceived 
the plan, but left the fulfilment thereof to the 
son. 

Until this time the merchants of London 
had stood in the open streets while transacting 
their business, and matters must have been 
somewhat difficult to arrange amid the general 



SIR THOMAS GRESHAM 45 

traffic and disturbance of Cornhill and Lombard 
Street I 

On the 7th of June, 1566, Gresham laid the 
foundation-stone of the new Bourse, and by 
November 1567 it was covered with slate, and 
shortly afterwards completed ; it was opened for 
the use of merchants at the end of the year 
1568. 

This first Exchange was destroyed by the great 
Fire of London in 1666, but several contempo- 
rary engravings of it still remain. It was built of 
brick, with an open court surrounded by a covered 
colonnade, where the merchants might walk while 
doing their business. This piazza was supported 
by marble pillars, and on the first storey were one 
hundred small shops, from the rents of which the 
cost of the building was to be gradually repaid : 
such was the " frugal mind " of the city bene- 
factor. Beside the south entrance was a square 
tower, from which a bell rang at midday and at 
six o'clock, summoning the merchants to their 
meetings. On that tower, and on the lofty one at 
the north gate, were emblazoned Gresham's crest 
of a grasshopper, and a statue of him stood below 
in the covered walk. 

On January 23, 1570, Queen Elizabeth made 
one of her royal progresses through the city, and 



46 IN SHAKSPERE'S ENGLAND 

dined with Sir Thomas Gresham at his house in 
Bishopsgate Street. Can we not see again the 
diplomatic nature of the Bourse's founder, which 
induced him, before that visit, to seek for keepers 
of the hitherto unpopular and largely untenanted 
shops on the upper storey of his Exchange, and 
by offers of reduced rent, and personal persuasion, 
to " compel them to come in " ? 

But the end — as was usual with Gresham — was 
achieved '; the Queen saw what she dearly loved, 
an imposing structure, apparently in a most 
flourishing condition, the shops richly furnished 
with the finest wares of the city (by Gresham's 
arrangement), and she was struck by the sight, 
just as he had intended her to be, "and caused the 
same burse by an herralde and a trompet to be 
proclaimed the Royal Exchange, and so to be 
called from thence forth, and not otherwise." 

It is in a play describing this scene that the tale 
is told of Gresham drinking the Queen's health in 
a cup of wine in which had been dissolved a costly 
pearl : so great was the opinion of his wealth held 
by writers of his own day ! 

In 1573 he entertained the Queen at his house 
in Mayfield, and two years later at Osterley, another 
of his many residences. A characteristic incident 
of this visit is told by Fuller ; how that the Queen 



SIR THOMAS GRESHAM 47 

" found fault with the court of the house as being 
too great," saying it would " be more handsome if 
divided with a wall in the middle," and that her 
attentive host sent to London for skilled and silent 
workmen, who effected the suggested changes in 
the watches of the night ! 

Sir Thomas only lived four years after this second 
visit of his royal mistress ; he died suddenly, of 
apoplexy, on November 21, 1579, a few years 
after the death of his only son Richard. 

His huge fortune he bequeathed in a princely 
manner. His wife was to be a wealthy woman 
till the day of her death, and besides his many 
other houses and manors he left her Gresham 
House, in London, for her lifetime, willing that, 
after her death, it should become the property of 
the College he had founded in London. 

To the almshouses too which he had built and 
endowed he left money ; and ^^lo a year each to 
certain poor prisoners in London prisons. And 
a large bequest to the Mercers' Company with 
which he had been connected throughout the 
whole of his long life. 

So passed away Sir Thomas Gresham, the 
great financier of his age, the Merchant Prince of 
Shakspere's London. He did not dream of the 
Wonderland of Faerie Queens, or lay sonnets at 



48 IN SHAKSPERE'S ENGLAND 

the feet of the Virgin EHzabeth — he never even 
sailed beyond that prosaic passage of the English 
Channel, and he left Sir Walter's Land of Gold 
contentedly alone — but no less than Spenser, or 
Sidney, or Raleigh was he one who lent all his 
powers to aid in the development of the New 
England of Shakspere's day. 

It was an age of great men, and in his kingdom 
of finance he too was great. He held the purse- 
strings of the country, and though he may have 
held them a trifle tight, and even have withdrawn 
from the purse a somewhat large wage for himself, 
no man of finance could have been wanting in a 
spirit of true greatness who planned and left behind 
him two such monuments as Gresham College and 
the Royal Exchange. 

The London merchant life, in Elizabeth's reign, 
of which Sir Thomas Gresham was the chief figure, 
had undergone a great change since the stormy 
years of the earlier Tudors. 

The New World opened new fields of commerce 
for English enterprise ; the peaceful state of the 
land at home contrasted well for English trade 
with the unsettled state of the Netherlands ; the 
new coinage increased the stability of trade every- 
where, especially abroad ; and in London, where 
first the effect of every new impetus to discovery 



SIR THOMAS GRESHAM 49 

or enterprise was felt, the merchants became more 
prosperous year by year. 

The distinction between men of rank and men 
of commerce, though still strong, was not so 
absolute as it had been in earlier days : the 
Queen showed personal favour to the great City 
magnates, and where royalty leads, others are 
sure to follow. 

Of the Lord Mayor of London, Harrison says : 
" There is no publike officer of anie citie in 
Europe, that may compare in port and counte- 
nance with him during the time of his ofHce," 
and the other magnates of the City were taking to 
a style of life which differed little from that of 
the nobles of the Court. As to their diet, Harrison 
says : '' The gentlemen and merchants keepe much 
about one rate, and each of them contenteth 
himselfe with foure, five, or six dishes, when he 
have but small resort, or peradventure with one, 
or two, or three at the most, when they have no 
strangers to accompanie them at their tables." 
He adds that " at such time as the merchants do 
make their feasts, it is a world to see what great 
provision is made of all manner of delicat meats, 
wherein they are often comparable herein to the 
nobilitie of the land." At these civic feasts they 
serve up, besides meat varying from that which 

D 



50 IN SHAKSPERE'S ENGLAND 

"the butcher usuallie killeth, geliffes" (jellies) of 
all colours in the forms of beasts, birds, fish, and 
flowers ; " marchpaine " — that sweet so highly 
appreciated at the present time — " wrought with 
no small curiositie, tarts of diverse hewes and 
sundrie denominations, conserves of old fruits 
forren and home-bred, marmilats, sugerbread, 
gingerbread, and sundrie outlandish confections." 
Such a banquet as these highly-seasoned dishes 
imply was held by each of the London City Com- 
panies on the Quarter Days, and such feasts must 
have done much to add to the esprit de corps of 
the different Merchant Guilds. No man could 
belong to one of these Guilds, or practise a trade, 
without first serving an apprenticeship, and in 
London especially the apprentices formed a large 
and powerful body of young men. They had 
their own military exercises, their own dress, with 
leather jerkin, flat cap, and club which they 
carried in place of a sword, and this characteristic 
weapon of theirs gave its name to their call to 
arms, whether for political warfare, or for help in 
a street riot. At the cry of " Clubs ! " the sturdy 
apprentices would pour forth from the shops and 
booths of merchandise, and woe to the stranger 
whom they judged to merit their displeasure ! 
Their position towards their master, whether gold- 



SIR THOMAS GRESHAM 51 

smith or silversmith, clockmaker, or trader in 
foreign goods, was one of great humility while 
the term of apprenticeship lasted ; the apprentice 
waited at table upon his master and his family, 
attended him in the street to carry any of the 
wares that were to be displayed in private houses, 
and while learning the trade, performed at the 
same time the duties of a servant. 

Many of the shops were open to the street, and 
the shopkeepers would sit and cry their wares, 
and importune customers to buy, more in the 
style of fair dealers of our own time. As to Sir 
Thomas Gresham's shops in the Royal Exchange, 
Harrison says that he endeavoured to let the 
underground part of the building for that purpose 
as well as the upper, but the plan was not success- 
ful. " Every man payed foure markes a yeare for 
every shopp above ; and he [Gresham] would have 
as much rent for every shop below as above, or 
else they should not have any shopps above ; and 
after they had kept shopps below a short season, 
what with the dampe of the vault, the darknesse 
of the place and the unwillingnesse of Customers 
to buy their wares there, they were so wearied, 
that they agreed among themselves to give foure 
pound a yeere for a shoppe above, so that they 
might be freed from keeping shoppes below, and 



52 IN SHAKSPERE'S ENGLAND 

that Sir Thomas Gresham should turne the vault 
to what other use he would, either for Merchants' 
goods or otherwise, which offer he accepted, and 
these tenants only furnished the shopps above, as 
they are at this day." 

The finest shops of the time seem to have been 
those in Cheapside, called " Goldsmiths' Row," con- 
taining the " most beautifull Frame of faire house 
and shops that be within the Wals of London, or 
elsewhere in England." These were supposed to 
be occupied by goldsmiths only, and orders were 
given in Council to turn out such as were not of 
that Company, and also to compel those who were 
to live in the Row, because by the intrusion of 
other merchandise there, whereby " the uniform 
show which was an ornament to those places, and 
a lustre to that city, is now greatly blemished." 

Another important City Company was that of the 
clockmakers ; no great house was now without a 
clock of its own, wrought in stone, or pearle, in gold 
or silver, and the art of clock and watchmaking 
had been carried to great perfection in England. 

The Mercers' Company was, of course, all- 
powerful, and regulated much of the foreign 
trade, as well as the merchant life at home, and 
its members were some of the wealthiest of the 
London citizens. 



SIR THOMAS GRESHAM 53 

The woollen manufactures of England had im- 
proved greatly during the reign of Elizabeth. 
Owing to the prosperity at home and the disquiet 
abroad, the English wool was no longer sent for 
manufacture to the Flemish industrial towns, but 
was worked up at home, and only sent abroad for 
dyeing. Master - manufacturers were beginning 
to employ numbers of workmen for looms under 
their control, and various places in England began 
to be known for the production of special goods, 
i.e. Manchester for cotton and frieze, York for 
coverlets, and Halifax for cloth, while the best 
broadcloth of the day was made in the West of 
England. 

The exclusive right of certain towns to manu- 
facture special goods, or the monopoly, as it was 
called, of those goods, was beginning to die out, 
and though Elizabeth made money throughout a 
great part of her reign by granting " monopolies " 
of certain articles, both in making and selling, to 
private persons, she gave up the practice three 
years before her death on the earnest remonstrance 
of her Parliament as to its ill effects on the general 
trade of the country. 

The London of Shakspere's day differed in 
many ways from that of our own time, and there 
was one difference more striking than all : not 



54 IN SHAKSPERE'S ENGLAND 

the comparative size of the capital then and now ; 
not the narrow, dirty, ill-kept streets, with their 
overhanging timbered houses, where we now have 
well-paved and well-kept thoroughfares ; but the 
fact that the river Thames, which to us means 
nothing but a broad turbid stream, acting the 
part of a commercial back street, and never used 
for pleasure by any one loftier than the passenger 
on a penny steamer, was then the great highway 
of London. On its stream, in private boats, men 
passed up and down on visits of state or pleasure, 
landing at the private steps to their own stately 
houses, many of which were built along its banks ; 
and there in royal state, surrounded by her 
courtly retinue of noble knights and ladies, came 
often the great Queen, floating in her gorgeous 
barge from the Palace of Whitehall to that at 
Greenwich where she had been born. Our 
London has gained much, but that we have lost, 
and nothing of like value has taken its place. 
The busy, busthng life of Tennyson's London is 
perhaps better represented by the crowded streets 
and the underground railway, but the light of 
memory will never shine on them as it shines still 
on the waters of Elizabeth's great highway. 

We look with pride on the crowded life of ever- 
increasing energy which is the heritage of our 



SIR THOMAS GRESHAM 55 

London, but it is with a tenderer feeling than 
that of pride that we picture the old-world life 
upon the sunlit river : soldier and explorer, 
knight and lady, busy craftsman and humble 
apprentice pass in turn before our sight, as they 
were wont to do in Shakspere's day, all ready to 
bow before the gaily-decked barge of the Queen 
who was so often among them. The Thames was 
the centre of London life then, and as such we see 
it still, in the tender light of memory. 

Old London naturally grew up round the banks 
of the river, which was only crossed by the famous 
London Bridge, shop-lined on either side. Just 
above the rapids formed by the arches of the 
bridge was the Old Swan landing-place where 
" prudent persons who feared to trust themselves 
to the rapids which ran through the narrow arches 
of old London bridge [used] to land at the Swan 
stairs and walk to the east side of the bridge and 
take boat again there." A little way below the 
bridge was Billingsgate, or Bellynsgate, which was 
then not only a fish market, but " an open place 
for the landing and bringing in of any fish, corn, 
salt stores, victuals and fruit." 

In London was vested the chief wealth of the 
country, far more than is now the case, and its 
wealth and prosperity seem to have impressed 



56 IN SHAKSPERE'S ENGLAND 

themselves on all who visited it. Stowe thus 
sums up a lengthy enumeration of the advantages 
of London to the kingdom, above those which a 
great town usually brings : — 

" By advantage of the scituation it disperseth 
forraine Wares to all the members most com- 
modiously. 

" By the benefite of the river of Thames, and 
great trade of Marchandize, it is the chief maker 
of Marriners, and Nurse of our Navie. 

" It releeveth plentifully not onely her owne 
poore people, but also the poore that from each 
quarter of the realme do flocke unto it ; and it 
imparteth liberally to the necessite of the Univer- 
sities besides. It is an ornament to the realm 
by the beautie thereof, and a terror to other 
countries by reason of the great wealth and fre- 
quencie. It spreadeth the honour of our Countrey 
far abroad by her long navigations, and maketh 
our power feared, even of barbarous Princes. It 
onely is stored with rich Marchantes ; which sort 
onely is tollerable : for beggardly Marchantes do 
byte too neere, and will do more harme than 
good to the realme." 

For the truth of the last statement we would 
not like to vouch, but his concluding words 
apply to the London of all time : " Almightie God, 



SIR THOMAS GRESHAM 57 

grant that her Majesty evermore rightly esteeme 
and rule this Citie ; and he give grace, that the 
Citizens may answere duly, as well towards God 
and her Majestic, as towardes this whole realme 
and countrie. Amen." 



CHAPTER IV 

SCHOOLS AND UNIVERSITIES 

Henry VIII. had done much for the foundation 
and endowment of schools in England, and his 
scholarly and short-lived son carried on the 
work. Many are the King's Scholars on different 
foundations who owe their scholarships to the 
royal revenues of that time, such as in King's 
School, Canterbury, founded by Henry VIII. in 
1 541, "for fifty poor boys, to be maintained at 
the cost of the Church, and instructed, as well 
as all others who flock to the school." 

Bath, Bedford, Bromsgrove, and Giggleswick 
are among the grammar schools founded and 
endowed by Edward VI., and nearly the last 
act of his life was that of signing the charter 
for Christ Hospital, the famous Blue Coat School. 
" Lord," said the dying boy, as he performed 
this last kingly duty, " I yield thee most hearty 
thanks that thou hast given me life thus long, 
to finish this work to the glory of thy name." 

Secular education was not of great interest to his 



SCHOOLS AND UNIVERSITIES 59 

austere sister Mary, but several fine schools were 
founded, and old ones endowed during her reign 
by private benevolence, such as Repton, Fel- 
sted, and St. Peter's School, York ; and many are 
the grammar schools which date their founda- 
tion or endowment from the prosperous days of 
Queen Elizabeth, amongst others those of Ash- 
bourne, Appleby, Faversham, and Wakefield. 
Stratford, where Shakspere was educated, had 
been founded in 1482, Derby even earlier. 
Coventry in 1546 was founded "as a free school, 
with a learned master to teach grammar, a 
learned usher, and a man skilful in music to 
teach singing " unto the children of all the free 
inhabitants within the citie and the inner liberties 
thereof gratis," 

We know little of the education of girls at the 
time of Elizabeth, except that those of high 
degree had begun to be trained in learning as 
well as accomplishments, and that, by the statutes 
of some of the early grammar schools, a limited 
number of girls were allowed to attend with the 
boys ; some statutes, those of Harrow, for in- 
stance, expressly prohibit girls from attending the 
school. 

Nor do we know much about the earliest stage 
of education, for most of the school statutes 



6o IN SHAKSPERE'S ENGLAND 

require that boys entering shall be able to read, 
and it is an exception to find provision made, 
as at Alford Grammar School, founded in 1565, 
"to teach young children the ABC, and also to 
read both English and Latin." And at Skipton, 
York, founded 1548, where the master is to be 
a chaplain or priest " who shall teach the boys 
the alphabet, according to the proper pronuncia- 
tion of syllables, and shall afterwards proceed in 
order in the grammar art and the rudiments 
thereof, with the frequent use in the Latin tongue, 
according to their capacities." 

During the reigns of Henry VIH. and his 
three children there was a very great advance 
in the founding of schools throughout the 
country. Eton, Winchester, and Westminster, 
St. Paul's, Shrewsbury, and Merchant Taylors' 
existed as they do now, and Harrow's " times 
were one " with those of Elizabeth, but the life 
and education has changed indeed since those 
days, when school life must have been an ordeal 
before which even a sturdy boy of our day 
might flinch. The work consisted chiefly of Latin 
and Greek, with grammar, and in many founda- 
tions singing and music. 

The discipline was maintained by severe methods. 
" If they offend," writes a pedagogue of the time, 



SCHOOLS AND UNIVERSITIES 6i 

" if they are detected in falsehood, if they sHp 
from the yoke, if they murmur against it, or com- 
plain in ever so little a degree, let them be most 
severely whipt, and spare neither the scourge, nor 
mitigate the punishment, till the proud heart shall 
be subdued, and they shall have become smoother 
than oil, and softer than a pumpkin." 

And of Mulcaster, the famous head-master of 
Merchant Taylors', it is written that " in a morning 
he would exactly and plainly construe and parse 
the lesson to his scholars, which done, he slept 
his hour (custom made him critical to proportion 
it) in his desk in the school ; but woe be to the 
scholar that slept the while. Awaking, he heard 
them accurately ; and Airopos might be persuaded 
to pity as soon as he to pardon where he found 
just fault. The prayers of cockering mothers pre- 
vailed with him just as much as the requests of 
indulgent fathers, rather increasing than mitigating 
his severity on their offending children." And 
this at a time when some of the school statutes 
decreed that boys were not to be admitted below 
four years of age ! 

Though founded by the boy-king, Edward VI., 
whose traditional character is one of gentleness, 
Christ Hospital seemed to exceed most schools in 
the severity it meted out to any scholars detected 



62 IN SHAKSPERE'S ENGLAND 

in the attempt to run away. For a first offence 
the culprit was put " into fetters," for the second 
he was confined in one of the dungeons, where, as 
Charles Lamb says, " a boy could just lie at his 
length upon straw and a blanket — a mattress, I 
think, was afterwards substituted — with a peep of 
light, let in askance, from a prison orifice at top, 
barely enough to read by. Here the poor boy 
was locked in by himself all day, without sight of 
any one but the porter, who brought him his bread 
and water — who might not speak to him ; or of the 
beadle, who came twice a week to call him out to 
receive his periodical chastisement, which was al- 
most welcome, because it separated him for a brief 
interval from solitude ; and here he was shut up 
by himself of nights, out of the reach of any sound, 
to suffer whatever horrors the weak nerves and 
superstition, incident to his time of life, might 
subject him to." 

More Hke the present-day school-boy than 
this sad captive is the Wykehamist, to whom 
Queen Elizabeth on her visit to Winchester 
addressed the inquiry whether he had ever 
endured the famous Winton birch, and who an- 
swered at once, " Infandum Regina, jubes renovare 
dolorem." 

But this is the dark side of the picture : and 



SCHOOLS AND UNIVERSITIES 63 

cheerful enough is the account of the Eton 
Collegers being called at five in the morning by 
one of the praepostors of the chamber, crying out 
Sttrgite in a loud voice ; and the boys while dress- 
ing themselves, and making their beds, repeating 
a prayer in alternate verses. " Each boy swept 
that part of the dormitory about his bed, and the 
praepostor chose four boys to collect the dirt into 
a heap and remove it. The whole of the boys 
then went in a row to wash, and afterwards re- 
paired to school. . . . One praspostor's special 
duty was to examine the scholars' hands and faces, 
and report any who came unwashed." 

Westminster and St. Paul's were well-established 
schools at this time, and Stowe tells how " under 
a wide-spreading tree in the churchyard of St. Bar- 
tholomew's, Smithfield, the scholars of St. Peter's 
annually enter the lists of grammar, chivalrously 
asserting the intellectual supremacy of Westminster 
against all comers." 

And Dean Colet's Statutes for St. Paul's are 
a delightful collection of wise previsions for 
bringing up boys. "There shall be taught in 
the Scole," says his Statute concerning " The 
Children," " Children of all Nations and Confres in- 
differently, to the number of One Hundred and Fifty- 
three, according to the number of the Seates in 



64 IN SHAKSPERE'S ENGLAND 

the Scole. The Maister shall admit these Children 
as they be offirid from tyme to tyme ; but first se 
that they canne saye the Catechyzon, and also 
that he can rede and write competently, else let 
him not be admitted in no wise." 

" A Childe at the first admission, once for ever, 
shall paye 4d. for wrytinge of his name ; this 
money of the admissions shal the poor Scholer 
have that swepeth the Schole and keepeth the 
seats cleane." 

'' In every Forme one principal] childe shal be 
placid in the chayre, President of that Forme." 

'<The children shall come into the Schole in 
the Mornynge at Seven of the clocke, both Winter 
and Somer, and tarye there untyll Eleven, and 
returne againe at One of the clocke, and departe 
at Five." 

These hours, with prayers three times a day, 
which the Statutes enjoin, seem somewhat lengthy 
to our ideas, especially as the Dean goes on to 
say, " I will they bring no meate nor drinke, nor 
bottel, nor use in the Scole no breakfasts, nor 
drinkings, in the time of learninge in no wise." 

" In the Scole," he says, " in no tyme of the 
yere, they shall use talough candell in no wise, 
but allonly wax candell, at the costes of their 
frendes." 



SCHOOLS AND UNIVERSITIES 65 

In a work on education, published in 161 2, the 
routine of grammar-school life is described as 
follows : — 

Work to begin at six, and an hour to be spent 
then in Latin exercises, and preparation of class- 
work to be carried on until nine o'clock. One 
quarter of an hour is here allowed for recrea- 
tion, and we should hope for breakfast, and then 
school again until eleven, when there is an 
interval of two hours. Work goes on again 
during most of the afternoon, and ends at half- 
past five, when the Master reads part of a chapter 
from the Bible, two staves of a Psalm and some 
prayers, after which this somewhat laborious 
schoolday comes to an end. 

In the Statutes of Durham it is decreed that 
'' if any one is found dull and without a taste for 
literature, the Dean should remove him, lest, like 
a drone, he devour the honey of the bees ; " and 
there is the same provision made in many 
instances, which seems highly desirable, as the 
hours were devoted so exclusively to gathering 
the honey of learning that the drones devoid of 
intellectual tastes must have been equally trouble- 
some to themselves and the " Maister." 

There must have been sports among the boys, 
and regular times for recreation ; in the Harrow 

E 



66 IN SHAKSPERE'S ENGLAND 

Statutes the amusements are restricted to " driving 
a top, tossing a hand-ball, running, shooting, and 
no other ; " and the parents are enjoined that 
"you shall allow your Child, at all times, bow- 
shafts, bow-strings, and a bracer, to exercise 
shooting ; " while at Shrewsbury, the school which 
numbered Philip Sidney among its scholars, the 
ancient Bailiffs' ordinances direct that " the 
Scholars shall play only on Thursday, unless 
there be a holy-day in the week, or at the earnest 
request of some man of honour, or of great 
worship, credit, or authority." No doubt they 
"played," whether Thursday or not, on the day 
when " Mr. Phillipe Siddney," at the age of nine- 
teen, revisited his old school with his father, and 
the school spent, in their honour upon "wine, 
cakes, and other things," the magnificent sum 
of 7s. 2d. 

At Shrewsbury their games were to consist of 
the somewhat curious choice between " shooting 
in the long-bow and chess play, and no other 
games, unless it be running, wrestling, or leaping, 
and no game to be above id., or match over ^d." 
And before they go to play even on Thursday, it 
is enacted that " the Scholars shall for exercise 
declaim and play one act of a comedy." 

Punishment in the form of the birch was 



SCHOOLS AND UNIVERSITIES 67 

evidently a prominent feature in Elizabethan 
education. The seals of Oakham, Rivington, and 
Blackburn bear each the device of a birch as their 
emblem ; and the seal of Louth School, founded 
in 1552, has represented on it a Master, with 
rod in hand, birching a boy before the assembled 
school. 

Very quaint to our ears are the stipulations in 
some of the Statutes of these old grammar 
schools. Brecon, for instance, founded '< for in- 
struction of all persons willing to be taught in 
good literature gratis ; " Caermarthen, " for the 
education of boys and youths in grammar and 
other inferior books ; " Abingdon, where sixty-three 
poor boys of the town and neighbourhood are to 
be educated, and with them " ten others " whom 
the master may '' take advantage of " ; Broughton, 
where an endowment is made for " an honest 
person, sad and discreet, to teach grammar ; " and 
St. Saviour's, Southwark, where besides an entrance 
fee of 2s. 6d., each poor scholar had to pay 2d. 
per quarter " towards brooms and rods." 

But faulty and severe as these Elizabethan 
schools seem to us in the light of modern educa- 
tion, they bred up noble and cultivated men ; they 
had the true principles of education at their 
foundation ; they had few books, but those they 



68 IN SHAKSPERE'S ENGLAND 

had they studied well, and they were founded 
almost always to the glory of God, and with the 
first intention of rearing boys in His service. 

Daily prayer and praise was ordained in most 
Statutes, and the founder's aim was usually that 
of Fanshawe, who endowed Dronfield School in 
Derbyshire in 1583, and who enjoins that the 
Masters are " to bring up their Scholars in the fear 
of God — that men seeing the ends of virtue in 
their youth, may be stirred up to bless and praise 
God for their pious education." 

From school life at the age of thirteen or four- 
teen, boys seeking a University training passed 
to Oxford or Cambridge. The Universities had 
undergone a great change during the last four 
reigns ; their life was largely bound up in the 
religious life of the country, and the violent 
changes through which that religious life passed 
within fifty or sixty years affected them severely. 
The Universities had been solemnly declared to 
be Protestant, and the new learning and philosophy 
had their rise among the scholars by the Isis 
and the Cam, but the semi-monastic atmosphere, 
which belongs so especially to the old form of 
Catholic religion, lingered on in the Universities 
long after it had died out elsewhere. 

About this time several new patrons arose to 



SCHOOLS AND UNIVERSITIES 69 

found and endow fresh colleges and halls both in 
Oxford and Cambridge. Queen Mary completed 
Trinity College, Cambridge ; Emmanuel, and 
Sidney Sussex, were both built in the reign of 
Elizabeth ; and in her reign, too, the celebrated 
London physician, Dr. Caius, incorporated a 
college bearing his own name with that of the 
older foundation of Gonville, and there, later 
on, he was buried in the chapel of his own 
college, beneath a monument bearing the terse 
inscription, " Fui Caius." 

At Oxford, Wolsey had reared the beginning of 
his grandly planned Cardinal's College, which 
Henry VIII. had finished, though on a much 
smaller scale, and had endowed as Christ Church ; 
St. John's, Trinity, Corpus, and the Welsh College, 
Jesus, all arose in Oxford about this time, as did 
also the Bodleian Library, and the Library at 
Cambridge. In Ireland, Trinity College, Dubhn, 
was founded, and in London the educational en- 
dowments of Sir Thomas Gresham's University, 
and the College of Physicians. Of course many 
of the colleges were of far older date, such as 
University, Merton, and William of Wykeham's 
magnificent foundation of New College, with its 
picturesque square gate tower, stately quadrangles 
and chapel, and the garden encircled by part of 



70 IN SHAKSPERE'S ENGLAND 

the city wall ; it must have formed a fine model 
for the colleges now increasing in number around 
it. The walls had to be thick then, and the gates 
strong, to guard not only against times of civil 
war, but also against the enmity between Town 
and Gown, which has lasted throughout the his- 
tory of the Universities, and which will probably 
last, though the warfare is waged now by tongue 
instead of fist, as long as the Universities them- 
selves endure. Harrison, who studied both at 
Oxford and Cambridge, writes, " That whatsoever 
the difference be in building of the towne streets, 
the townesmen o£ both are glad when they may 
match and annoie the students, by incroaching 
upon their liberties, and keepe them bare by 
extreame sale of their wares." 

The colleges were not originally established as 
places of instruction, but for the exercise of 
religious duties and of study ; then came the 
poor scholars, who were gradually added to the 
endowed Fellows and Head, of whom the college 
first consisted, and these scholars were atjDne 
time taught by the Head himself. 

But in 1548 there is mention made of the 
Tutors or " Masters to whose instruction the 
juniors are to be committed ; " and in the 
Statutes of Queen's College, Oxford, it is enjoined 



SCHOOLS AND UNIVERSITIES 71 

that the scholars, before waiting upon the Fellows 
at dinner, shall answer questions upon their knees ; 
not a position which the modern undergraduate 
would choose to assume for his viva voce. 

The compulsory cehbacy of the College Fellows, 
which lasted until modern days, was, of course, a 
relic of the old Catholic ecclesiastical times. 

As to education, the Universities were then, as 
they have always been, the home of classical 
studies, nor did they undertake to teach elemen- 
tary work. Even as early as 1549 the Statutes 
enact that candidates for admission to the colleges 
at Cambridge must pass a preliminary examination 
in the rudiments of grammar, and that the colleges 
are not to give instruction in that branch. 

Latin, Greek, Mathematics, Theology, and Philo- 
sophy were the principal subjects of study ; men 
were given to a familiar use of Latin in everyday 
life highly unattractive to the modern undergra- 
duate, or even Fellow ; long Latin orations were 
bestowed freely on any distinguished visitor to the 
University, and not unfrequently answered in the 
same tongue. When Queen Elizabeth visited Ox- 
ford in September 1592, such eloquence seemed 
to have pursued her throughout her stay, and 
been with her to the end ; even when the sights 
and sounds of academical life should have been 



72 IN SHAKSPERE'S ENGLAND 

left behind, and on their homeward journey when 
she and her escort had passed from the city up the 
steep side of Shotover, the Queen had to Hsten 
from "her open and princely carriadge to a long 
and tedious oration made unto her by the Junior 
Proctor of the University." 

And we yet feel a thrill of old-world pride in the 
Queen who could answer her academical subjects 
in speeches both in Latin and in Greek, as " long," 
and no doubt quite as " tedious," as their own ! 

However, Elizabeth evidently enjoyed greatly 
her glimpses of University life, and in one of her 
Latin orations she declares, " Ever since I have 
come to Oxford, I have seen much, and I have 
heard much, and I have approved of all. For 
everything was discreetly done and elegantly said." 

Prominent in academic education then were the 
" Disputations," in which various scholars would 
engage from time to time on special subjects. 

Elizabeth attended two of these in one after- 
noon, during her first visit to Oxford ; they were 
held in St. Mary's Church, and were on the subjects 
of Natural Philosophy and Physicke. " Mr. Dr. 
Dochin," who answered the second Disputation, 
began with the usual flattering oration to the 
Queen, " for hir gratious favour, in vouchsafing 
hir presence at this exercise, being so excellent a 



SCHOOLS AND UNIVERSITIES 73 

Prince, and so singularly well seene even in this 
very faculty, amongst many other, hir virtues and 
great excellency of knowledge and learning, which 
he wished she might have in use of hirself ; " but 
in spite of this courtly beginning, the account goes 
on to say that " Mr. Dr. Dochin," having entered 
into a short exposition of one of the questions, 
"was soon cut off by the Proctors, and the Re- 
plyers called for." On the other hand, Mr. Giles 
Thompson, the leader in the Disputation on 
Natural Philosophy, " handled the questions prin- 
cipally, and spent no time at all in the commenda- 
tion of hir Majestic, or of the nobility," for he 
sayd " their virtues were greater then that they 
could be sufficiently recommended by him." 

The acting of Plays was at this time greatly prac- 
tised by the scholars of the Universities; on Sunday 
night Elizabeth heard " graciouslye and with great 
patience," two Latin Plays "performed but meanly," 
as the MS. of Stringer says, in Christ Church Hall. 

The life of the students was still monastic in its 
severe simplicity ; they rose at five in the morning, 
and in the evening the college gates were closed 
at eight in winter and nine in summer, and the 
proctors finding any one outside his gate after these 
hours, "would take no excuse," — an announce- 
ment terrible from its vagueness. 



74 IN SHAKSPERE'S ENGLAND 

Corporal punishment lasted at the Universities 
until the end of the seventeenth century. 

A Latin MS. by a scholar of St. John's College, 
Cambridge, gives an account of his day as it was 
usually spent : — 

" The greater part of the scholars get out of bed 
between four and five o'clock of the morning ; 
from five to six they attend the reading of public 
prayers, and an exhortation from the Divine Word 
in their own chapels ; they then either apply to 
separate study, or attend lectures in common, 
until ten, when they betake themselves to dinner, 
at which four scholars are content with a small 
portion of beef bought for one penny, and a sup 
of pottage made of gravy of the meat, salt, and 
oaten flour. From the time of this moderate meal 
to five in the evening they either learn or teach, 
and then go to their supper, which is scarcely 
more plentiful than the dinner. Afterwards prob- 
lems are discussed, or other studies pursued, until 
nine or ten o'clock ; and then about half-an-hour 
is spent in walking or running about (for they have 
no hearth or stove) in order to warm their feet 
before going to bed." 

It is a somewhat severe routine when compared 
with that of the modern undergraduate, but there 
must have been many youths of good family whose 



SCHOOLS AND UNIVERSITIES 75 

time was passed in far less exclusive devotion to 
study, and who came up, as men have come to the 
Universities in all ages, to finish there that unde- 
fined curriculum — the education of a gentleman. 
There have been idle and pleasure-loving students, 
as well as those thrifty and intellectual, both at 
Oxford and Cambridge, from time immemorial, 
and the Universities probably differ less than any 
other part of England from what they were in 
Shakspere's day. We have no knowledge that the 
Great Man himself was ever in either home of 
learning, but it is not difficult to bring back in 
imagination the figures of his contemporaries who 
once studied within college walls. Even now, so 
unchanged are they in outward appearance, that 
one could easily fancy a black-gowned figure in a 
quiet Cambridge court, suddenly turning towards 
one the round girlish face of the great philosopher, 
Francis Bacon ; one could almost see Sidney's grace- 
ful form pass out at any moment from beneath the 
gateway of Christ Church, or imagine the Hall at 
Oriel graced once more by the presence of the 
" wise white head " which fell upon the block nearly 
three hundred years ago. Harrison studied both 
at Oxford and Cambridge, and praises the buildings 
of each in emphatic terms. The colleges of Oxford, 
he says, ''are much more statelie, magnificent, and 



76 IN SHAKSPERE'S ENGLAND 

commodious than those of Cambridge ; and there- 
unto the streets of the towne for the most part 
more large and comelie. But for uniformitie of 
building, orderlie compaction, and politike re- 
quirent, the towne of Cambridge [as the newer 
workmanship] exceedeth that of Oxford (which 
otherwise is, and hath beene, the greater of the 
two "). 

" The professors," he says, " have all the rule of 
disputations and other schoole exercises, . . . and 
such of their hearers, as by their skill in the same 
disputations, are thought to have atteined to anie 
convenient ripenesse of knowleledge, . . . are per- 
mitted solemnlie to take their deserved degrees of 
schoole in the same science and facultie wherein 
they have spent their travell." 

" From that time forward, also," he adds, " they 
use such difference in apparell as becommeth their 
callings, tendeth unto gravitie, and maketh them 
knowne to be called to some countenance." 

And with the donning of the apparel that 
tendeth unto gravity, t'.e. the graduate's gown, and 
with the University degree — or frequently at that 
time without it — the scholar passed from the 
arena of academical life in quiet Hall and cloister, 
into the great world of activity and enterprise 
which composed the England of Shakspere's day. 



CHAPTER V 

ARCHBISHOP PARKER : THE JESUITS AND 
INDEPENDENTS 

Had Elizabeth succeeded to the crown of Eng- 
land immediately after the death of her father, her 
position with regard to the Church would have 
been far less difficult than it actually was. 

She desired to continue the Reformation of the 
English Church on the lines on which he had 
begun it, but there stretched between his work and 
hers the reigns of her brother and sister during 
which religion, on either side, had been fanned 
into fanaticism. But Elizabeth was the true 
daughter of Henry VIII., no difficulties daunted 
her, no foes intimidated her ; she was far more of a 
politician than a religious enthusiast, and as a poli- 
tician she set to work upon the religious problems 
of her reign, just as she worked at all other poli- 
tical problems. 

With her usual discernment in choosing suitable 
men for her advisers — if this most dictatorial 
monarch can be described as possessing advisers 

77 



78 IN SHAKSPERE'S ENGLAND 

at all — she selected as Archbishop of Canterbury, 
in succession to Cardinal Pole, Matthew Parker, a 
celebrated Cambridge scholar. 

Parker was the son of a " calenderer " of Nor- 
wich, and had been born in that town on August 
6th, 1504, and sent as a youth to Cambridge, first 
to St. Mary's Hostel, and then to Corpus Christi 
College. 

He was a man of moderate views, sensible, 
unemotional, slow to anger, and industrious, and 
he proved a wise and sound councillor and an 
active helper to the Queen in the long hard 
years that lay before the Church of England. 

Parker was endeared to Elizabeth by early 
association, for he had been chaplain to her unfor- 
tunate mother, and later on had lived a studious 
and peaceful life as Dean of St. John-at-Stoke, in 
Suffolk. 

In 1544 he had returned to Cambridge as 
Master of Corpus, recommended to the Fellows 
of the college in the royal order " as well for 
his approved learning, wisdom, and honesty, as 
for his singular grace and industry in bringing 
up youth in virtue and learning, so apt for the 
exercise of the said roome, as it is thought very 
hard to find the like for all respects and purposes." 
To Cambridge, and more particularly to Corpus, 



ARCHBISHOP PARKER 79 

Parker was devotedly attached throughout his 
Hfe, and he made an energetic and conscientious 
Master, revising the accounts of the college, which 
he found in a state of confusion, and making 
inventories of the goods and estates belonging 
to it. 

Then came the violent ecclesiastical changes 
of Edward's and Mary's reigns, during the first 
of which Parker was in high favour, and was 
made Dean of Lincoln, while during the gloomy 
years of Mary he lived in constant fear of his 
life. It was in flying from his pursuers on one 
occasion then that he had a severe fall from his 
horse, which left injuries from which he never 
entirely recovered. 

But with the accession of Elizabeth he had 
no longer any need to fear : she seemed to re- 
cognise in him the man she required to help 
her in restoring to the country a national 
Church ; one that would be a via media between 
Roman Catholicism and the severe doctrines of 
Luther and Calvin. 

There was a difficulty about Parker's consecra- 
tion : three bishops refused to have any part 
in it, but others were found to take their place, 
and the ceremony was performed with the Litany, 
the laying on of hands, and other ritual, on 



8o IN SHAKSPERE'S ENGLAND 

December 17th, 1559, in the Archbishop's Chapel 
at Lambeth. 

Parker had not been eager for the appoint- 
ment, and had written at length to Lord Burghley, 
then William Cecil, urging how few qualifications 
he possessed for the post ; poor, and in bad 
health owing to his late accident. "Flying in a 
night," he writes, " from such as sought for me to 
my peril, I fell off my horse so dangerously, that 
I shall never recover it ; and by my late journey 
up, and my being there at London not well 
settled, it is increased to my greater pain. I 
am fain sometime to be idle, when I would be 
occupied, and also to keep my bed, when my heart 
is not sick." 

He also felt himself far fitter for a life of quiet 
study at his beloved University than for such a 
prominent position as that of Archbishop ; he 
evidently feared what, in a later letter to Cecil, 
he calls his " overmuch shamefastness," which 
prevented him from " raising up his heart to 
utter in talk with others," and which he again 
attributed to " passing those hard years of Mary's 
reign in obscurity." But Elizabeth's will was not 
to be gainsaid, and he was consecrated to the 
vacant see of Canterbury. 

In one particular he had not the approval of 



ARCHBISHOP PARKER 8t 

the Queen, and that was in the fact of his being 
married ; Elizabeth never becanrie reconciled to 
the idea of marriage among the clergy, but as 
she was so strongly opposed to marriage among 
the laity, especially among her friends, it perhaps 
detracted somewhat from the strength of her op- 
position. Parker had been married on the 24th 
of June 1547, to Margaret, daughter of Robert 
Harleston, of Malsall, in the county of Norfolk, 
gentleman, and she made him a good and de- 
voted wife until her death in 1570, when he 
mourned her as his " most beloved and virtuous 
wife," It was to Margaret Parker that Elizabeth 
addressed her witty and characteristically non- 
committal speech, when she bade her farewell, 
after visiting her and her husband at Canterbury : 
"Madam I may not call you, Mistress I will not 
call you, but whatever you are, I thank you for 
your hospitality," 

Parker was more of a Protestant than the 
Queen in matters pertaining to the conduct of 
services. He urged her to remove the crucifix 
and the wax candles from the altar of her private 
chapel, and he wrote, with others of the clergy, 
entreating her, at great length, and in the most 
emphatic terms, to put down the use of images 
in the Church, " In the zeal of God," he urges 

F 



82 IN SHAKSPERE'S ENGLAND 

her, " utterly to remove this offensive evil out of 
the Church of England, to God's great glory, and 
our own great comfort." 

On the other hand, he received a vigorous letter 
from the Queen on the subject of general seemli- 
ness and keeping clean of churches. '' It breedeth 
no small offence and slander," she writes, " to see 
and consider, on the one part, the curiosity and 
costs bestowed by all sorts of men upon their 
private houses, and on the other part, the unclean 
or negligent order and sparekeeping " — (an ex- 
pressive word, and one it is a pity we have lost !) — 
" of the house of prayer, by permitting open decays 
and ruins of coverings, walls and windows, and by 
appointing unmeet and unseemly tables with foul 
cloths for the communion of the sacraments, and 
generally leaving the place of prayers desolate of 
all cleanliness and of meet ornaments for such a 
place, whereby it might be known a place provided 
for divine service." 

But though Elizabeth's hereditary instincts were 
in favour of the " seemliness " of the ancient ritual, 
the position of political affairs on the Continent 
forced her into the post of leader to the Protestant 
reform-party in Europe. 

It was chiefly owing to her wisdom, and to the 
moderation of Parker, that the English Church 



ARCHBISHOP PARKER 83 

developed into its present form, and did not follow 
the more severe teachings of Calvin and John 
Knox. 

Knox, who was a Scotchman, born at Hadding- 
ton, had been a popular preacher in England 
during the reign of Edward VI., and, on Mary's 
accession, he had fled to Geneva, and become an 
ardent disciple of Calvin. In his hatred of the 
principles alike of the English and the Scotch 
Marys, he had written a furious work against the 
rule of women, entitled, " Blast of the Trumpet 
against the Monstrous Regiment of Women," and 
this alone was quite enough to make Elizabeth 
prohibit him from preaching in England. So he 
returned to his native land, and there, until his 
death in 1572, he worked with fierce and narrow- 
minded severity, but with sincere and lofty un- 
selfishness, to bring about a state of rigid reform 
in Scotland. 

With the spread of his doctrines, and the change 
of religious opinions in Scotland, the end came to 
the political union of that country with France ; in 
moral and religious temper the two nations drifted 
apart, never again to be united. 

The via media along which Elizabeth and 
Parker toiled unceasingly to lead the Church of 
England, lay between those followers of Calvin 



84 IN SHAKSPERE'S ENGLAND 

and Knox, who on account of the strict purity of 
their lives began to be called Puritans, and the still 
mighty power of the Roman Catholic Church. 

In the year 1540, Ignatius Loyola had founded 
the order of the Jesuits, who were to live a very 
different life from that of the early monastic orders. 

Loyola had been a Spanish officer, and being 
disabled from military service by a wound re- 
ceived while fighting the French, he threw his 
whole enthusiastic nature into the founding of an 
order which should unite religious zeal with mili- 
tary discipline. In this he succeeded beyond 
what he could have imagined. For good or for 
evil the Society of Jesus has been a mighty power 
ever since its foundation. 

Instead of the older idea of life in a monastery, 
cut off largely from contact with the world, the 
Jesuits were to live in the world, to travel through 
all lands, to wear no special garb, to consider any 
means fair by which they could bring back souls to 
the Roman Cathohc Church. 

It needed, indeed, incessant work and watch- 
fulness on the part of the English bishops to 
guard against the influence of such men as these, 
so devoted to one cause, and that one of hostility 
to the English Church. 

Parker was earnest in his requests to Cecil to 



ARCHBISHOP PARKER 85 

fill the vacant bishoprics in the North, knowing 
that the Queen was not free from her father's 
practice of appropriating Church revenues, and 
seeing how evil was the effect on the people 
of keeping them without proper ecclesiastical 
authority. 

" The people there," he writes, " is offended 
that they be nothing cared for. Alas, they be 
people rude of their own nature, and the more 
had need to be looked to for retaining them in 
quiet and civility." And he even goes so far as 
to say, " I know the Queen's Highness's disposition 
to be graciously bent to have her people to know 
and fear God ; why should others hinder her 
good zeal for money sake, as it is most commonly 
judged ? " 

And that his words were not idly spoken is 
shown by the letter he received from the Bishop 
of Durham four years later, speaking most 
strongly on the need for reform in his diocese and 
those around it. 

"The old vicar of Blackburn, Roger Linney," 
he writes, " resigned for a pension, and now 
Whalley has as evil a vicar as the worst. ... If 
your grace would, either yourself or by my lord 
of York, amend these things, it were very easy." 

And, so hopeful is Bishop Pilkington of the 



86 IN SHAKSPERE'S ENGLAND 

efficacy of archiepiscopal interference, that he 
adds cheerfully, " one little examination or com- 
mandment to the contrary would take away all 
these, and more." 

He goes on to speak somewhat slightingly of 
his Episcopal brothers in the neighbourhood, 
affirming that " the bishop of Chester has com- 
pounded with my lord of York for his visitation, 
and gathers up the money by his servant ; 
but never a word spoken of any visitation or 
reformation ; " and adding that " the Bishop of 
Man lies here at ease, and as merry as Pope 
Joan." 

Parker was a man who in all things sought 
moderation ; he was anxious to restore as far as 
possible the old unity to the Church of England ; 
his own words were " that that most holy and 
godly form of discipline which was commonly 
used in the Primitive Church might be called home 
again." He aimed at restoration, not at innova- 
tion, though he was less attached than Elizabeth 
to the outward emblems of worship to which the 
Puritans were so bitterly opposed, and which 
made them style him, on account of his office, the 
" Pope of Lambeth." 

Elizabeth used him in religious affairs much as 
she used Burghley and Walsingham in secular, to 



ARCHBISHOP PARKER 87 

carry out unpopular measures, keeping herself 
sedulously in the background. 

It was through him that all her attempts were 
made to enforce uniformity of dress and conduct 
among the clergy during the services, and he 
writes often almost in despair to his confidant, Sir 
William Cecil, on the difficulty of his position. 
" Must I do still all things alone ? " he asks 
pathetically. " I am not able, and must refuse 
to promise to do that I cannot, and is another 
man's charge." . . . And later, in the same 
letter, he says, " And yet I am not weary to bear, 
to do service to God and to my prince ; but an 
ox can draw no more than he can." 

He is much troubled here with those who 
"profess openly, for all their brag of six hundred 
communicants, that they will neither communicate 
nor come in the church where either the surplice or 
the cap is." Verily, his task was not an easy one ! 

In 1563 he received a letter from the Lords of 
the Council informing him that Dr. Thirleby and 
Dr. Boxall, the deprived Bishop of Ely, and Dean 
of Peterborough, who had been placed in the Tower 
on their refusal to take the oath of the Queen's 
supremacy, were to be, in future, lodged in his 
house, " for their better safeguard from the pre- 
sent infection of the plague." 



88 IN SHAKSPERE'S ENGLAND 

The Archbishop's own safeguard, or that of his 
household, does not seem to have been considered 
in the matter, though the disease was so wide- 
spread, that Dr. Thirleby wrote to Parker, " I 
doubt what ways we may come without danger of 
the plague to your grace, all the places in the way 
being so sore infected, yet they say need maketh 
the old wife to trot." 

Poor Dr. Thirleby begins his letter to his com- 
pulsory host by saying, " Your grace knoweth the 
proverb, ' An unbidden guest wotteth not where 
to sit ; ' " but Parker answers him, a few days 
afterwards, kindly, if not enthusiastically, " Sir, as 
an unbidden guest, as ye write, knoweth not 
where to sit, so a guest, bidden or unbidden, being 
content with that which he shall find, shall deserve 
to be the better welcome." And letting not any 
compassion he may feel for his clerical brothers in 
affliction override his sturdy common-sense, he 
proceeds to place the two plague-infected divines 
" in the town not far from my house here at 
Bekesborne, in an house at this present void of a 
dweller, till such time as they were better blown 
with this fresh air for a fourteen days." They 
lived with him, as his guests, for many years, often 
causing him no small inconvenience. 

In February 1563, when the French invasion 



ARCHBISHOP PARKER 89 

was feared, Parker writes to Cecil asking him 
'' what were best to be done with my two guests 
which ye sent me, in this time and country, in 
such vicinity ? although," he adds, " I judge by 
their words that they be true Englishmen, not 
wishing to be subject to the governance of such 
insolent conquerors." 

Dr. Thirleby died at Lambeth in August 1570. 
The receiving of official visitors into his house was 
an obligation regularly laid upon Parker by the 
thrifty Queen, who loved to see her guests well 
housed and entertained at the expense of her sub- 
jects rather than herself. 

On May 14th, 1564, she wrote to him, by the 
hand of Cecil, to make ready to meet and enter- 
tain the French ambassador, Mons. de Gonour, 
either at Canterbury or Bekesbourn, whichever 
he preferred. 

Parker writes a delightful letter to Cecil, a few 
days after the arrival of his foreign visitors, in 
which he begins by the somewhat ironical remark 
that the chief minister does not " need to be in- 
formed of the natural disposition of the French- 
men, late made our friends." 

The Archbishop's own opinion of the natural 
disposition does not seem to be high, as he men- 
tioned that the " young gentlemen " in attendance 



90 IN SHAKSPERE'S ENGLAND 

on the ambassador had evidently been " well 
advertised to see to their behaviour within the 
realm," so that after their departure he '' could 
not charge them either with word or deed, or pur- 
loining the worth of one silver spoon : somewhat 
otherwise than I did doubt of before." 

Of the ambassador himself he speaks as " of a 
good, gentle nature," and he describes how they 
walk together in his garden at Bekesbourn, with 
the Bishop of Constance — " a soft, good-natured 
gentleman " — whom Gonour has brought with 
him as interpreter, and discuss the conduct of the 
English Church services. 

" I perceive," says Parker, " that they thought, 
before their coming, we had neither statas preces, 
nor choice of days of abstinence, as Lent, &c., nor 
orders ecclesiastical. . . . And thereupon, part by 
word, and partly by some little superfluity of fare 
and provision, I did beat that plainly out of their 
heads. And so they seemed to be glad that in 
ministration of our Common Prayer and Sacra- 
ments we use such reverent mediocrity, and that 
we did not expel musick out of our quires, telling 
them that our musick drowned not the prin- 
cipal regard of our prayer." 

His own expression " reverent mediocrity " well 
describes his own position throughout his ministry. 



ARCHBISHOP PARKER 91 

He goes on to say that "he made them a fish 
supper on Friday night ... in respect of their usage 
at home," and discussed with them the marriage of 
the clergy, and the authority of the Pope ; and be- 
cause they " much noted the tract of this country 
in the fair plains and downs so nigh the sea "- — 
evidently with a view to the projected French in- 
vasion — he adds that, " I thought_good, in a little 
vain brag (unpriestly, ye may say), to mVe-A-piece 
of mine armoury in a lower chamber, nigh to my 
court, subject to their eyes ; whereby they did 
see that some preparation we had against their 
invasion, if it had been so purposed." 

In almost every letter he writes, Parker shows the 
same shrewd insight into the difficulties of the time, 
and sound common-sense in dealing with them. 

His interest in his beloved University never 
flagged, and in matters at Oxford, too, he took 
constant part. 

We find him writing to the Warden of All 
Souls', advising him to melt down the " super- 
stitious plate " " reserved " there, for future use in 
the college ; and the year after the election of a 
new Warden, he writes to Lord Burghley — as 
Cecil has now become — begging him " to be good 
to this honest young man, the Warden of All 
Souls' College." 



92 IN SHAKSPERE'S ENGLAND 

He tries to settle a dispute among the Fellows 
of Merton, relating to the number of priests 
to be elected, and also a long controversy at 
Gonville Hall — soon to become the College of 
Caius and Gonville — between the Master and 
Fellows. '' Scholars' controversies," he writes, " be 
now many and troublous ; and their delight is to 
come before men of authority to shew their wits," 
&c. . . . But '• my old experience there," he adds, 
"hath taught me to spy daylight at a small hole." 

In 1 57 1, friendly relations in England between 
Roman Catholics and Protestants were rendered 
for the future impossible by the Papal Bull issued 
by Pius V. excommunicating Elizabeth, and ab- 
solving her Roman Catholic subjects from their 
allegiance. The quarrel had been made political ; 
henceforth there could be nothing but warfare 
between the two forms of religion. 

The following year there died in Scotland the 
stern, uncompromising leader of the northern 
Puritans, John Knox, " the only great man," it 
has been said, *< among all the reformers that 
spoke the English tongue." 

In Cambridge the Independent element, led by 
Cartwright, was growing apace, and the Papal 
Bull did more than all else to draw to the Queen's 
side the very Puritans of whom she disapproved : 



ARCHBISHOP PARKER 93 

the issue of the Bull had caused the religious 
struggle to become a national one. 

But for only a few more years did Archbishop 
Parker join in the struggle. His wife had died in 
August 1570, and his own health had been failing 
for some time : he had worked hard, and the 
longing for rest must have been strong in him 
at times. In the last letter he ever wrote to 
Burghley he speaks of having " a great while 
provided for death," and he " trusts that this shall 
be one of the last letters " he ^all write to his 
old friend. 

He died on St. Patrick's Day, 1575, and was 
buried in his own chapel at Lambeth. 

He had written much, and taken great trouble 
to collect old and valuable MSS. from the wrecked 
monasteries, and these, with books and money, he 
bequeathed to Cambridge. 

He spent a laborious life in the service of his 
country and his Queen, and if he lacked the heroic 
and saintly characteristics which have been often 
seen in the holders of his office, it must be re- 
membered that he lived in troublous times, and 
that he spent his life in trying to lessen the 
trouble. 

After his death the fight waxed fiercer between 
the English Church and the Roman Catholic power 



94 IN SHAKSPERE'S ENGLAND 

in England : and five years later a band of Jesuits 
arrived secretly in England to undertake the re- 
conversion of the people to the old form of 
worship. 

The party was led by Robert Parsons and 
Edmund Campion, men who had both been edu- 
cated at Oxford, and who brought well-trained 
and cultivated minds to the carrying out of the 
difficult and dangerous task imposed upon them 
by the general of their order. 

Parsons was an able man, of great industry and 
resource, and was chosen as leader of the expedi- 
tion, but Campion's is the figure which has left 
the deepest impression on all students of the ill- 
fated enterprise. 

He had been one of the most brilliant scholars 
of his time at Oxford, and had been noticed by 
Elizabeth and Leicester for the ability he showed 
when taking part in a disputation before them at 
the University ; but he had not been able to re- 
concile his conscience to taking orders in the 
English Church, and had gone to Ireland first, and 
then to the Jesuit College at Douai in Flanders, 
which had been founded by an Englishman 
named Allen, for the training of English Catholics 
chiefly for the priesthood, and where he had 
formally repudiated the Protestant faith. He 



ARCHBISHOP PARKER 95 

was ordained at Douai, and went on a pilgrimage 
to Rome, where he became a Jesuit, and was 
chosen to undertake with Parsons, his old fellow- 
student at Oxford, the hazardous work of restoring 
the Roman Catholic religion in England. Dis- 
guised and separate, the two friends landed ; and 
by his splendid preaching, his persuasive powers, 
and the sympathetic charm of his nature — to 
which even his enemies bore witness — Campion 
won many to his side. He and his party came 
to do exactly what Elizabeth was trying her 
best to prevent, to separate the lukewarm Roman 
Catholics from those who were earnest and 
consistent. 

Elizabeth's Settlement of Church Affairs had 
always aimed far more at political safety than 
religious satisfaction, and such work as the Jesuits 
came to do must inevitably, if successful, under- 
mine that safety. 

The Queen had been excommunicated by the 
Pope ; the English Roman Catholics had been 
absolved from their allegiance to her ; the Jesuits 
came to win back the English nation in a mass to 
the Roman Catholic religion ; the inference was 
obvious. 

The Jesuit movement could not be suffered in 
England, however strong was the Queen's own 



96 IN SHAKSPERE'S ENGLAND 

feeling towards the old faith, and her dislike to 
taking up a firmly Protestant attitude. 

It is a fascinating story for those who can bear 
details of mortal anguish, those eighteen months 
which Campion spent in England, between the 
time of his landing and his death. 

But here the mere outline must suffice. He 
and Parsons, after being in London for a time, set 
out on a tour through the country ; they knew 
that they carried their lives in their hands, but as 
Campion said, almost with his last breath, " It is 
not our death that ever we feared." They held 
services in secret, they confessed penitents, they 
celebrated Mass, and everywhere they urged the 
Roman Catholics to cease from the compulsory 
attendance at public worship enjoined by law. 
Everywhere the members of their faith flocked to 
hear them, and every day the political danger in- 
creased, especially after the publication of Campion's 
book, on which he had been for some time engaged, 
" Decem Rationes ; " or, " Ten Reasons for being a 
Catholic." Parsons, when the pursuit against them 
began to wax hot, made his way to the coast, and 
escaped to the Continent, but Campion still con- 
tinued his work of secret exhortation and instruc- 
tion. He was a hngh-souled, earnest enthusiast, 
and his thoughts were too much filled with the joy 



ARCHBISHOP PARKER 97 

of bringing back the souls of the wandering into 
what he beheved to be the only true fold to allow 
of his taking any heed for his own safety. 

He wrote to the general of his order, " My 
soul is in my own hands ever. Let such as 
you send make count of this always : — The 
solaces that are intermeddled with the miseries 
are so great that they not only countervail the 
fear of what temporal government soever, but by 
infinite sweetness make all worldly pains seem 
nothing." 

He was at last taken prisoner at a country- 
house near Abingdon Lyford in Berkshire, where 
he had gone to bring the solaces of confession 
and absolution to a party of nuns who had long 
been sheltered there. 

He was carried to London, and over his im- 
prisonment, examination by torture, trial and 
execution, we must not linger : such belong to 
a more detailed ecclesiastical work than this has 
any claim to be. It is enough here to say that 
even his enemies were struck by the wisdom 
and sweetness with which he answered his 
opponents in the disputations held before his 
death, and when his body was worn by imprison- 
ment and suffering. 

As he stood beneath the gallows they bade 

G 



98 IN SHAKSPERE'S ENGLAND 

him pray in English, but he answered, continuing 
his devotions in Latin, '* I will pray to God in 
a language we both understand." 

" Pray for the Queen," they shouted, and he 
prayed for her : " For Elizabeth, your Queen and 
mine, to whom I wish a long quiet reign and all 
prosperity." 

But how could Elizabeth reign in quiet and 
prosperity if her subjects were absolved from their 
allegiance to her as a part of their religion ? 

So on December ist, 1581, died the saintly 
enthusiast, Edmund Campion, with the same un- 
flinching courage with which men of every age 
and every race have been ready to meet death 
for the form of Christianity in which they felt 
salvation was to be found. 

Two years after the execution of Campion 
and his companions, Parker's successor. Arch- 
bishop Grindal, had been deposed by Elizabeth 
for refusing to carry out her orders as to repres- 
sing Puritan Assemblies, or Prophesyings, and 
she had appointed to the See of Canterbury an- 
other famous Cambridge scholar, John Whitgift. 

The leader of the Puritan or Independent party 
at Cambridge was Thomas Cartwright, and he 
and Whitgift had many disputes over matters of 
Church organisation, Cartwright upholding the 



ARCHBISHOP PARKER 99 

expediency of returning to what he called the 
organisation of the Primitive Church. 

He was the ablest of the Puritans, and was a 
learned man, a powerful preacher, and a clever 
disputant, though too impulsive for the leader 
of a party, and often lacking soundness of judg- 
ment. But he and his followers had much right 
on their side in the charges they brought against 
the corrupt state of Church patronage. He held 
the Margaret Professorship at Cambridge for 
some time, but was deprived of it by Whitgift 
during his Vice-Chancellorship, on account of his 
attacks on Church government. 

For some time he lived abroad, writing many 
controversial works, and ministering to the 
English congregation at Antwerp. In 1585 he 
returned to England, and soon afterwards was 
made by Leicester master of his picturesque 
hospital for old men at Warwick. 

He continued to preach to large congregations 
round Warwick, and he lived in wealth and com- 
fort till 1603, when he died quietly in his own 
house. According to Harrington, his last words 
were of contrition, " for the trouble he had caused 
in the Church." 

His views of Church government were largely 
Presbyterian, and along with the "trouble" he 



L.oFC,5 



loo IN SHAKSPERE'S ENGLAND 

had caused, he had done valuable work in stir- 
ring up the Puritans to protest against much that 
was lax and unjust in the management of Church 
affairs throughout England. 

We, who in the beginning of the twentieth 
century see the comparative smoothness with 
which the English Church maintains its position 
and government, can hardly realise how great 
was the " tribulation " through which it passed 
in the successive reigns of Henry VIII. and his 
son and daughters. 



CHAPTER VI 

FRANCIS BACON 

Among the many brilliant figures of Shakspere's 
time, none, save the great master himself, left so 
deep a mark on future ages as did Francis Bacon ; 
and no career begun with fairer promise ever ended 
in more pathetic gloom. Not Sidney's gallant 
death upon the foreign field of battle, or even 
Raleigh's upon the scaffold, had the tragic sense 
of failure which darkened Bacon's life, apart from 
his work. 

It has been said that to know the life of a great 
writer is a mistake, and, if ever this is true, it is so 
in the case of Bacon. What we learn from his 
writings is a grand lofty philosophy which lifts us 
above the sordid temptations of the world, while 
in his life we see him always among the multitude, 
struggling, maybe, with difficulties, but constantly 
yielding to them ; practising a morality no higher 
than that of his fellows ; so that when the end 
comes, and his career is closed in gloom, and 
something akin to shame, we cannot help feeling 



102 IN SHAKSPERE'S ENGLAND 

that his fall is great in proportion to the heights to 
which his genius might have risen. 

Francis Bacon was born three years before 
Shakspere, on the 22nd of January 1561, at York 
House, in the Strand. His father, Sir Nicholas 
Bacon, was Lord Keeper to Queen Elizabeth, and 
his mother. Lady Ann (whose father had been 
tutor to Edward VI.), was a gifted and pious lady, 
and passionately attached to her two sons, Anthony 
and Francis. 

Anthony was the elder by two years, and the 
brothers were devoted companions almost until his 
death. They were both delicate, and were brought 
up at home, either in London, amid the atmos- 
phere of the Court, or in the beautiful country- 
seat of the family at Gorhambury. There among 
the woods and meadows, with flowers and birds 
for his daily playmates, Francis learned his first 
lessons of that communion with nature that was 
hereafter to bear such fruit. 

Fair and graceful, well-born and carefully nur- 
tured, noticed by the great folks of the day, and 
called by the Queen herself her ''young Lord 
Keeper," what brighter opening could his life have 
had? 

When he was twelve years old, and Anthony 
fourteen, they went together to Cambridge, and 




Walker d- Cockcreli 



Francis Bacon 



FRANCIS BACON 103 

studied at Trinity under Whitgift, who was then 
Master of the College, and afterwards became 
Archbishop of Canterbury. 

Later on, Francis went to Paris, and while he 
was there the death of his father took place, and 
he was thus, on the very threshold of his career, 
thrown almost entirely upon his own resources. 

Not only had the Lord Keeper very little to 
leave to his younger son, but Francis lost by his 
death the natural introduction to public life which 
he needed, and which, had Sir Nicholas lived, 
would have been his by right. 

He returned from France immediately, and 
entered at Gray's Inn, where for many years he 
and his brother lived in rooms together. Anthony, 
too, was poor, for Sir Nicholas had been married 
twice, and his property had passed to his eldest 
son by the first marriage. 

Lady Ann and her two sons were devotedly 
attached to each other, though her stern self- 
controlled nature, with its deep religious sense, 
trained as she had been in a strictly Calvinistic 
household, made her a great contrast to her 
pleasure-loving and tolerant-minded sons. 

They lived in London, she at Gorhambury, 
among her plants and her poultry, and many a 
letter she wrote them, of dictatorial motherly 



io4 IN SHAKSPERE'S ENGLAND 

counsel, injunctions against late suppers, unwhole- 
some diet, and tardy risings in the morning, 
accompanied by gifts from her larder, such as 
pigeons and home-brewed beer. 

The brothers were certainly delicate, and both 
appear to have inclined towards habits of self-in- 
dulgence and extravagance, and want of money 
seemed to be an ever-present evil with them. 
Indeed, considering the well-paid positions which 
Francis Bacon held for so many years, the 
regularity of his life, and his absence of family 
ties, it seems difficult to explain the fact of his 
being all his life in want of money, and even 
having twice been arrested for debt. 

Lord Burghley was his uncle by marriage, 
Lady Burghley being the sister of Lady Ann 
Bacon, and Francis evidently hoped great things 
from this connection with the powerful minister. 
Why his hopes were not realised is hard to 
explain ; it seems strange to us who look back 
through the clear light of history to see, in an age 
when men of ability rose so easily to power, 
the brilhant, amiable, courtly Bacon, living on 
with his sickly brother in their cramped routine at 
Gray's Inn, putting forth from time to time such 
literary work as had never before been seen in 
England, and yet sueing so long unsuccessfully 



FRANCIS BACON 105 

to his uncle and others to put him into an office 
where he might " eat a piece of bread." 

Whether he sued too humbly — for then, as now, 
men were taken at their own valuation — whether 
he was personally disliked by his uncle, or whether 
the shrewd statesman distrusted his philosophical 
ideas and his New Learning, we cannot tell, but 
the fact remains, that where many rose into 
power and wealth whose abilities could in no way 
compare with those of Bacon, we see him begging 
for posts year after year, and when at last he 
attained to the position of authority he sought, it 
was by persistent importunity, which in our eyes 
seems inconsistent with the lofty doctrines which 
his writings breathe in every page. His great 
friend and supporter at Court was Essex ; im- 
perious, arrogant, and overbearing as the Earl 
was in many ways, to Bacon he always proved 
himself a loyal friend. He craved advancement 
for him from the Queen so urgently, indeed, that 
she grew angry at the idea that even so beloved a 
friend as Essex should presume to dictate to her. 

In April 1594 the Attorney-Generalship, for 
which Bacon had urgently begged, and which 
Essex had done his best to procure for him, was 
given to Coke, for long Bacon's legal rival and 
after this almost his personal enemy. 



io6 IN SHAKSPERE'S ENGLAND 

Coke was Attorney-General, and Bacon con- 
tinued his old life ; speaking in Parliament, pro- 
ducing the books which keep his memory green 
to all time, and living the most uncomfortable 
kind of life, that which is straitened for want of 
means, and lacks an established position. He 
had lost by death both his brother and Lady Ann, 
and his kindly nature, which no want of worldly 
success seemed to sour, turned to make fresh 
ties. 

In 1606 he married Alice Barnham, one of the 
four daughters of a worthy London citizen, whose 
widow had become the wife of a jovial country 
knight. Sir John Pakington. 

One of the brightest pictures in Bacon's 
shadowed life is that of his wedding in the 
fairest month of the year, and of the ride through 
country lanes to the church of St. Marylebone. 
He is clad in purple from head to foot, including 
even his velvet cap and shoes, and his young 
bride rides beside him in her brave array of 
white, embroidered heavily with gold and silver, 
and attended by her three gay young sisters, and 
her cheery stepfather. Of his subsequent married 
life we know hardly anything, nor from the perusal 
of his <' Essay on Love " are we led to think that 
his matrimonial happiness was great. He hardly 



FRANCIS BACON 107 

ever mentions his wife, and in his will only makes 
a scanty provision for her. Possibly he was 
attracted by her youthful beauty and freshness, 
but a man with Bacon's nature, and in such a career 
as his, required something more in his wife than 
grace and beauty. 

In 1600 came the trial and fall of Essex, and 
nothing seems to make comprehensible the fact 
that Bacon allowed himself to be chosen as 
lawyer to plead against his former friend and 
patron, the one man who had always loyally 
stood by him. 

But so it was ; he may have been overcome 
by fear of displeasing the despotic Queen, who 
with advancing age could less brook the smallest 
opposition to her wishes, but the fact remains 
that Essex was condemned to death, largely 
through the instrumentality of Bacon. It is a 
blot upon his memory which nothing can efface, 
and for which there seems no kinder explana- 
tion than that of moral cowardice. But what 
seems even less generous than his speech against 
his friend while living, is that he allowed him- 
self to be chosen to write the account of the charges 
against the gallant but ill-fated earl, and of their 
supposed justification, after he had suffered his 
tragic fate upon the block. 



io8 IN SHAKSPERE'S ENGLAND 

Bacon justified himself in this as he did in all 
his conduct, or rather he did not seem to see that 
any justification was necessary. His belief in the 
worth of his own work, and the importance of 
his being sufficiently well placed in the world to 
carry it on properly, was such that it overcame 
all other feelings : he wanted wealth and power, 
not for their own sake, but to enable him to 
devote himself to the great task of spreading the 
New Learning of which he held the key. That 
seems to have been his position, and he seemed 
to hold all right and justifiable which tended to 
this end. It was not personal gratification he 
desired, or advancement for his own sake, he had 
a lofty aim in view, but he never seemed to see 
the crookedness of the paths by which he struggled 
towards it. 

In his letter to Essex before his conderiination, 
he writes : " I humbly pray you to believe that I 
aspire to the conscience and commendation, first, 
of bonus civis, which with us is a good and true 
servant to the Queen, and next, of bonus vir, 
that is an honest man." 

But the trial went its way ; Essex suffered his 
fate, and Bacon received ^1200 from the fines 
which fell vacant by his death. "The Queen has 
done something for me," he writes to one of his 



FRANCIS BACON 109 

creditors, " though not in the proportion I had 
hoped." 

Great political changes took place in the next 
few years ; Elizabeth laid down the sceptre she 
had borne with honour for more than forty years, 
and Scottish James reigned in her stead. 

Burghley, too, was gone, and by his son, Robert 
Cecil, Bacon seemed never to have been valued. 
But yet now for a time honours fell thick upon 
him. Two days before the coronation of James 
he was knighted at Whitehall, though only in com- 
pany with three hundred others ; on the 25th of 
June 1607, he was appointed Solicitor-General, and 
six years later he became Attorney-General, at the 
age of fifty-two. And yet his idea of his own 
position is still the same, that the posts for which 
he had begged with unwearied assiduity, and to 
which he had at length attained, are but a means 
to an end. 

" For myself," he writes in a Latin " Proem " on 
the Interpretation of Nature^ " my heart, is not set 
upon any of those things which depend upon 
external accidents. I am not hunting for fame : 
I have no desire to found a sect, after the fashion 
of heresiarchs ; and to look for any private gain 
from such an undertaking as this, I count both 
ridiculous and base. Enough for me the con- 



no IN SHAKSPERE'S ENGLAND 

sciousness of well-deserving, and those real and 
effectual results with which Fortune itself cannot 
interfere." 

He was now in favour at Court; the King 
trusted him, and he seemed on the best of terms 
with the Duke of Buckingham, to whom " he pro- 
fessed the most sincere devotion." 

On the 7th of March 1617, he was made 
Chancellor, and wrote thus to the Duke : — 

" My dearest Lord, — It is both in cares and 
kindness that small ones float up to the tongue, 
and great ones sink down into the heart with 
silence. Therefore I could speak little to your 
Lordship to-day, neither had I fit time : but I must 
profess thus much, that in this day's work you are 
the truest and perfectest mirror and example of 
firm and generous friendship that ever was in 
Court. And I shall count every day lost wherein 
I shall not either study your well-doing in thought, 
or do your name honour in speech, or perform you 
service in deed. Good, my Lord, account and 
accept me, your most bounden and devoted 
friend and servant of all men living, 

" Fr. Bacon, C.S." 

And yet it did not seem long since he had 
written to Essex, then the Court favourite, " For 



FRANCIS BACON iii 

your Lordship, I do think myself more beholding 
to you than to any man. And I say, I reckon 
myself as a common (not popular but common) ; 
and as much as is lawful to be enclosed of a 
common, so much your Lordship shall be sure to 
have. Your Lordship's to obey your honourable 
commands, more settled than ever." 

In 1618 Bacon became Lord Chancellor, and was 
created Baron Verulam, and two years later Vis- 
count St. Albans. So his long struggle for worldly 
advancement was crowned with success, and for a 
few years he enjoyed the position for which his 
abilities so well fitted him. Then came the end, 
and his fall, so sudden and so complete that 
even at this distance of time it startles and be- 
wilders one to read of it. Nor is it easy to explain 
fully. 

It began by an inquiry of the House of 
Commons into the conduct of the " Referees " who 
had been employed to certify to the legality of the 
Crown patents which had been much abused. Of 
these Referees the Lord Chancellor was the chief. 
This inquiry led to others. Bacon had many 
rivals, and several enemies in high places, of 
whom the chief was Coke, who now used all his 
influence against him. 

The blame gradually came to be shifted on to 



112 IN SHAKSPERE'S ENGLAND 

Bacon's shoulders, and the inquiry became a 
personal one as to his conduct. He was accused 
of corrupt dealing as a judge ; the charges swelled 
and swelled until they reached a formidable mag- 
nitude. He was accused of taking large bribes 
from suitors while the suits were pending, and 
the strange thing seemed to be that this was the 
case, and that Bacon seemed always to have 
acquiesced in the system which then existed. It 
seemed as if, although he only did as others of 
his time had done, he alone was to suffer because 
to him alone had been given the insight of genius 
by which he might have risen above the corrupt 
morality of his age. 

However that may be, and however incompre- 
hensible it is even now to our minds, the inquiry 
meant to him nothing less than political ruin. 
And this although no charge of wrong judgment 
was brought against him. And the strangest part 
of all seems to us that Bacon made no effort to 
answer or to refute the charges. He simply 
bent before his judges, stunned and overwhelmed, 
confessing, bewailing, entreating for mercy. His 
sentence was indeed severe. He was fined 
^40,000, though such sentences then were rarely 
fully carried out. He was to be imprisoned in 
the Tower, which was what he appeared to dread 



FRANCIS BACON 113 

more than anything else, and he was no longer to 
have the right to sit in Parliament, or to hold any 
office under Government, or to come within a 
certain distance of the Court. Buckingham was 
the one man who pleaded for lighter treatment, and 
spoke of the illness from which Bacon was then 
suffering, and it was he who procured his release 
from the Tower after a few days' confinement 
there. From the Tower Bacon writes to him : — 

" Good my Lord, — Procure the warrant for my 
discharge this day. Death, I thank God, is so far 
from being unwelcome to me, as I have called for 
it (as Christian resolution would permit) any time 
these two months. But to die before the time of 
his Majesty's grace, and in this disgraceful place, 
is even the worst that could be ; and when I am 
dead, he is gone that was always in one tenor, a 
true and perfect servant to bis master ; and one 
that was never author of immoderate, no, nor un- 
safe, no (I will say it) nor unfortunate counsel ; 
and one that no temptation could ever make other 
than a trusty, and honest, and thrice-loving friend 
to your Lordship ; and (howsoever I acknowledge 
the sentence just, and for reformation sake fit) the 
justest Chancellor that hath been in the five 
changes since Sir Nicholas Bacon's time. 

H 



114 IN SHAKSPERE'S ENGLAND 

" God bless and prosper your Lordship, whatso- 
ever become of me. — Your Lordship's true friend, 
living and dying, Fr. St. Alban. 

"Tower, 31st May 1621." 

Five years longer this wonderful life lasted. 
He had made full confession ; he might write that 
he felt the " sentence just and fit, for reformation 
sake," and yet, to the last, he never seemed to feel 
himself disgraced, or beyond the pale of employ- 
ment by the Crown. 

But his public life was over ; it had begun with 
the fairest promise, and had run a chequered 
uphill course till it seemed at last to have 
reached the " shining table-land of success," and 
this made only more overwhelming the gloom 
of shame and dishonour that enshrouded its 
close. 

The last five years of his life he spent in 
ever busy efforts to regain something of what 
he had lost, and also in bringing out his great 
Latin work, the Novum Organum. His strong 
religious sense kept him cheerful and patient even 
in dire adversity. But the end was near. 

In March 1626, while travelling on a cold day, 
he desired to make an experiment on the power 
of snow to arrest decay in flesh. He dismounted 



FRANCIS BACON 115 

from his coach, bought a hen from a poor woman, 
and with his own hands stuffed it with snow. 
But the quaint experiment cost him his hfe. He 
was seized with a violent chill, and was taken to 
the neighbouring house of Lord Arundel, where 
he died on Easter Day, April 9th, 1626. 

The most loving personal description we have 
of him is that left by his chaplain, Dr. Rawley, 
who writes, " That if there were a beam of know- 
ledge derived from God upon any man in these 
modern times, it was upon him." He talks of his 
charm in personal intercourse and conversation, so 
that '' I have known some," he says, " of no mean 
parts, that have professed to make use of their 
note-books when they have risen from his table. 
In which conversations, and otherwise, he was no 
dashing [one to dash, i.e. intimidate others] man, 
as some men are, but ever a countenancer and 
fosterer of another man's parts. Neither was he one 
that would appropriate the speech wholly to him- 
self, or delight to outtire others, but leave a liberty 
to the co-assessors to take their turns. Wherein 
he would draw a man on, and allure him to speak 
upon such a subject, as wherein he was par- 
ticularly skilful, and would delight to speak. And 
for himself, he contemned no man's observations, 
but would light his torch at every man's candle. 



ii6 IN SHAKSPERE'S ENGLAND 

'< This lord was religious, ... as appeareth by 
several passages throughout the whole current of 
his writings. Otherwise he should have crossed 
his own principles, which were. That a little philo- 
sophy maketh men apt to forget God, as attributing too 
much to second causes; but the depth of philosophy 
bringeth a man back to God again. 

" He repaired frequently, when his health would 
permit him, to the service of the Church, to hear 
sermons, to the administration of the Sacrament 
of the blessed body and blood of Christ ; and died 
in the true faith, established in the Church of 
England." 

Whatever may be said against Bacon, none can 
deny that he was a most industrious literary 
worker, and this industry continued to the end of 
his life. It is not possible to look at that life 
without seeing its many shortcomings, but, as 
Dean Church says, " it is not too much to say 
that in temper, in honesty, in labour, in humility, 
in reverence, he was the most perfect example 
that the world had yet seen of the student of 
nature, the enthusiast for knowledge." 

His New Philosophy was given to the world 
first in "The Advancement of Learning," pub- 
lished in 1605, and later on, in fuller form, 
in the Novum Organum, published in 1620, in 



FRANCIS BACON 117 

Latin, which language he preferred for Hterary 
work. 

His great idea was that men should put aside 
all vague scientific speculations, and approach all 
knowledge through the careful study of facts and 
observation. He did not go far himself on the 
road of scientific study, but he pointed out a 
new and truer method for future students than 
the existing speculative philosophy. His " History 
of Henry VII." shows also in the method of 
studying history a great advance upon the older 
mere chronicle style. 

But his best known works will always be the 
" Essays," which were published in three editions. 
The first edition was the earliest of his published 
works, and came out in 1597, containing ten 
essays; the second edition, in 161 2, contained 
forty, and the full number, fifty-eight, came out 
in the third edition, in 1625. 

These essays contain wisdom sufficient for a 
man's lifetime, and delivered in short, pithy 
sentences, with an absence of ordinary style, that 
only make them the more impressive. Their 
wisdom is most cynical, as in the two on Love 
and Marriage, but also most practical, as in his 
words on " Expence." " A man had need, if he 
be Plentiful!, in some kind of Expence, to be as 



ii8 IN SHAKSPERE'S ENGLAND 

Saving againe in some other. As if he be Plenti- 
ful! in Diet, to be Saving in Apparell : If he be 
Plentifull in the Hall, to be saving in the Stable : 
And the like. For he that is Plentifull in Ex- 
pences of all kindes, will hardly be preserved from 
Decay." And most applicable are those words to 
his own career. He was not a great thinker, or a 
great scientific discoverer, but he was the man 
who popularised knowledge for the ages that came 
after him. 

And the truest and saddest criticism of his life 
is to be found in his own words to his friend. 
Sir Thomas Bodley, which he repeated again 
later in the form of a prayer, " Knowing myself 
by inward calling to be fitter to hold a book than 
to play a part, I have led my life in civil causes, 
for which I was not very fit by nature, and more 
unfit by the preoccupation of my mind." 



CHAPTER VII 

SIR PHILIP SIDNEY 

No two lives could form a more striking contrast 
than those of Francis Bacon and Philip Sidney. 
The one, living to see the world's recognition and 
admiration, for which he had toiled so long and 
wearily, taken from him at the end, and to see his 
sun set, amid shadows of gloom and disappoint- 
ment ; the other basking from his childhood, 
throughout his short life, in such " favour with 
man " as has been rare in any age, and when his 
sun " set at noonday," leaving passionate love and 
admiration behind him as his heritage for ever. 

In an old MS. Psalter, now in the Library of 
Trinity College, Cambridge, we find this entry of 
his birth : " The nativitie of Phillippe Sydney, 
Sonne and heire of S"" Henrie Sydney, Knighte, and 
the Lady Marie his wyfe, eldest daughter of John, 
duke of Northumb., was one Fryday in the 
morning, Annis R. Regis Philippi et Marie R. 
Regine primo et secundo et anno D'ni, milesimo 

quinqentessimo, quinquagesimo quarto. His god- 

X19 



120 IN SHAKSPERE'S ENGLAND 

fathers were the greate King, Phillippe, King of 
Spaine, and the noble John Russell, erle of Bed- 
ford. And his godmother, the most vertuous Ladie 
Jane, Duchesse of Northum., his grandmother." 

Fair as was the prospect that opened before the 
child, born of noble and high-minded parents, in 
the beautiful old house of Penshurst, among the 
pleasant hills of Kent, there were dark shadows of 
the past to which the last entry in the baptismal 
register bore witness. 

"The most vertuous Ladie Jane," alike god- 
mother and grandmother to the little Philip, had 
seen her husband, her son Guildford, and her 
gentle daughter-in-law Lady Jane Grey, pass in 
turn to their doom upon the scaffold, only one 
short year before the birth of her little grandson. 

No gentler, more gracious lady in Elizabeth's 
time appears before us than Lady Jane's daughter, 
the Lady Mary Sidney, child of the stricken house 
of Northumberland, and sister to the ill-fated 
Guildford, and to the brilliant Court favourite, 
Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester. 

Philip's love for his parents, for Sir Henry 
Sidney (his bluff, honest, independent father), and 
for his sweet and kindly mother, was strong 
throughout his life, and it is a part of the romantic 
and picturesque completeness of that life that 




Sir Philip Sidney 



SIR PHILIP SIDNEY 121 

father, mother, and son passed away within six 
months of one another, 

A kindly and unselfish life must have been that 
of Lady Mary, willingly spent in the service of 
husband, children, and queen, and sacrificing even 
her beauty for the sake of Elizabeth, whom she 
tended through a severe attack of small-pox, 
which left the devoted nurse badly marked for 
life. 

Philip was the eldest of seven children, of whom 
two died in infancy, and one, Ambrozia, in girl- 
hood. His two brothers, Robert and Thomas, 
were both serving with him in the Netherlands at 
the time of his death, and his sister Mary, to whom 
he was devotedly attached, and who seems to have 
resembled him in many ways, married Henry, the 
Earl of Pembroke. 

His father. Sir Henry, was one of the most 
faithful and least courtier-like of Elizabeth's ser- 
vants. He had been Governor and companion 
to Edward VI. when Prince of Wales, and the boy- 
king had died in his arms. The Queen trusted him, 
for none could mistrust the righteous dealing of the 
sturdy old knight, but he possessed few of the 
elegant courtesies the Queen loved, and she never 
showed him much personal favour. He held the 
offices in turn of Lord Deputy of Ireland, and Lord 



122 IN SHAKSPERE'S ENGLAND 

President of the Marches of Wales, and bitterly did 
she resent his expenditure in the former unhappy 
country, where no amount of expenditure seemed 
to produce much appreciable result. 

While Lord President of Wales, and therefore 
living at Ludlow Castle, Sir Henry sent his sons 
to school at Shrewsbury, and there Philip made 
the friendship with Fulke Greville which lasted 
throughout his life. 

Philip must have been a most engaging boy ; to 
his personal beauty all his biographers testify, his 
straight, well chiselled features, clear dark eyes, 
and waving auburn hair ; and his character must 
have inherited much of the kindly sweetness of 
his mother's, and yet had beneath it a fire of 
originality that must quickly have made itself felt 
in the boy-world of Shrewsbury. Greville speaks 
of him in his school-days as " never other than 
a man ; with such staidness of mind, lovely and 
familiar gravity as carried grace and reverence 
above greater years. His talk ever of knowledge, 
and his very play tending to enrich his mind. So 
as even his teachers found something to observe 
and learn above that which they had usually read 
or taught." 

Grave, he must have been, according to our 
ideas of boyhood, but in such a nature as his the 



SIR PHILIP SIDNEY 123 

spirit of the times and the tragic fate of his 
mother's family might well produce gravity ! 

He had the advantage of loving sympathy from 
both his parents in his school-life, as is shown in 
the letter which Sir Henry sent to him at Shrews- 
bury, and to which Lady Mary adds a postscript. 
Surely no modern father could improve upon its 
wise and kindly advice to a dearly loved son at a 
public school ? 

"This is my first letter that ever I did write 
to you," he says, '' and I will not that it be all 
empty of some advices, which my natural care 
for you provoketh me to wish you to follow, as 
documents to you in this your tender age. Let 
your first action be the lifting up of your mind to 
Almighty God by hearty prayer ; and feelingly 
digest the words you speak in prayer, with con- 
tinual meditation and thinking of Him to whom 
you pray and of the matter for which you pray. 
And use this as an ordinary act, and at an 
ordinary hour, whereby the time itself shall put 
you in remembrance to do that which you are 
accustomed to do in that time. Apply your study 
to such hours as your discreet master doth assign 
you earnestly ; and the time I know he will so 
limit as shall be both sufficient for your learning 



124 IN SHAKSPERE'S ENGLAND 

and safe for your health. And mark the sense 
and the matter of that you read, as well as the 
words. So shall you both enrich your tongue 
with words and your wit with matter ; and judg- 
ment will grow as years groweth in you. Be 
humble and obedient to your master, for unless 
you frame yourself to obey others, yea, and feel 
in yourself what obedience is, you shall never be 
able to teach others how to obey you. Be 
courteous of gesture and affable to all men. . . . 
Use moderate diet, so as after your meal you may 
find your wit fresher and not duller, and your 
body more lively and not more heavy. . . . Use 
exercise of body, yet such as is without peril of 
your joints or bones ; it will increase your force 
and enlarge your breath. Delight to be cleanly. 
. . . Give yourself to be merry, for you degenerate 
from your father if you find not yourself most 
able in wit and body and to do anything when 
you be most merry ; but let your mirth be ever 
void of all scurrility and biting words to any man, 
for a wound given by a word is oftentimes harder 
to be cured than that which is given with the 
sword. Be you rather a hearer and bearer away 
of other men's talk than a beginner and procurer 
of speech ; otherwise you shall be counted to 
delight to hear yourself speak. . . . Never let 



SIR PHILIP SIDNEY 125 

oath be heard to come out of your mouth nor 
word of ribaldry ; detest it in others ; so shall 
custom make to yourself a law against it in your- 
self. . . . Above all things, tell no untruth ; no, 
not in trifles : the custom of it is naughty. . . . 
Study and endeavour yourself to be virtuously 
occupied, so shall you make such a habit of well- 
doing in you that you shall not know how to do 
evil though you would. . . . Well, my little 
Philip, this is enough for me, and too much, I 
fear, for you. . . . Your loving father, so long as 
you live in [the fear of God, H. Sidney." 

Could any advice be more appropriate to a 
public school-boy in any age than this letter ? 
And the same loving wisdom and interest in 
their dearly-loved son breathes through gentle 
Lady Mary's note : — 

" I bless you with my desire to God to plant 
in you His grace, and warn you to have always 
before the eyes of your mind those excellent 
counsels of my lord, your dear father, and that 
you fail not continually once in four or five days 
to read them over. . . . See that you show 
yourself a loving, obedient scholar to your good 
master, and that my lord and I may hear that 
you profit so in your learning as thereby you 



126 IN SHAKSPERE'S ENGLAND 

may increase our loving care of you. . . . Fare- 
well, my little Philip, and once again the Lord 
bless you. — Your loving mother, 

" Mary Sidney." 

From Shrewsbury, the " little Philip," when 
only fourteen, went to Christ Church, where he 
met the second of his two great friends, Edward 
Dyer, best remembered as the author of the 
famous line, " My mind to me a kingdom is." 

At Oxford he stayed for three years, and then 
left, as was often the custom then, without taking 
his degree, and went abroad to make the grand 
tour. 

Little did the kindly parents think, when 
planning the advantage of a foreign trip for their 
beloved son, that they were sending him to 
witness the most terrible act of religious per- 
secution that had ever taken place in modern 
times ! 

With a letter of introduction from his uncle, 
the Earl of Leicester, to Sir Francis Walsingham, 
the English Ambassador in Paris, and afterwards 
Philip's father-in-law, the young man arrived in 
the French capital. Only a few months after 
his coming the massacre of St. Bartholomew took 
place, and Paris and the surrounding country ran 



SIR PHILIP SIDNEY 127 

red with the blood of hundreds of loyal Huguenot 
subjects. This awful experience, when his own 
life was only saved by his taking refuge in the 
English Embassy, left an impression which never 
faded from the mind of young Philip Sidney. 
It is seen over and over again in his strong 
adherence to the reformed religion and his op- 
position to the old Roman Catholicism, and also 
in his antagonism, which not even royal dis- 
pleasure could weaken, to Queen Elizabeth's mar- 
riage with one of the reigning house of France. 

Such was the lasting effect on his mind of that 
terrible night of August 24th, 1572. The Court 
of England went into mourning, and Rome re- 
sounded with services of thanksgiving ! 

Sidney continued his tour, and at Frankfort 
met the French professor, Lanquet, with whom 
he kept up a close friendship until his death. 

At Venice the great painter Paolo Veronese 
painted his portrait, and so he wandered on, from 
city to city, storing up a wealth of knowledge 
for the future, and winning friends everywhere 
by the gracious sweetness of his disposition. 

But this time of travel, delightful as it must 
have been to such a man, could not last for ever, 
and when he was twenty-one, Philip returned to 
the Court of Elizabeth, there to be its brightest 



128 IN SHAKSPERE'S ENGLAND 

ornament, and the comfort and stay of his good 
parents, whose services were but ill-requited by 
the parsimonious Queen. 

But the atmosphere of the Court was distasteful 
to the young knight ; he had always been grave 
beyond his years, and his experience in Paris 
had shown him life in its most terribly realistic 
forms, so that we can understand his feeling 
little sympathy with the showy and frivolous sides 
of Court routine in which Elizabeth delighted. 

But she kept him at her side as one of her 
royal pensioners, and he accompanied her on 
many of her progresses, including that to Kenil- 
worth, where she was feted by Leicester with such 
magnificence. 

As was the case with most of the favourites 
of Elizabeth, Philip was constantly in need of 
money ; Court favour was an expensive luxury 
to keep up ; even in the matter of presents to 
his royal mistress it meant from the young knight 
such costly New Year's gifts as a golden heart, 
a golden chain, and a whip with a golden handle. 

Sir Henry Sidney's income had chiefly gone in 
maintaining his official position, and he had little 
to spare for the help of his three sons ; and the 
marriage of his uncle, the Earl of Leicester, or 
rather, the fact of that marriage being made 



SIR PHILIP SIDNEY 129 

public, interfered with Philip's credit, as he had 
always been supposed to be his uncle's heir. 

His great wish was for some employment 
abroad, but the Queen liked to keep her more 
accomplished gentlemen at her side, and for some 
time he was obliged to be content with the duties 
of a " carpet-knight." 

However, in the early part of the year 1577, he 
was chosen by the Queen to carry her congratula- 
tions to the Emperor Rudolph II. on his accession, 
and before his return he had an interview with 
William the Silent, who spoke of him as " one of 
the ripest and greatest counsellors of estate that 
at this day lived in Europe " — high praise to so 
young a man from such a judge as the stern 
Prince of Orange. 

Sidney returned once more to the life of the 
English Court, where Elizabeth showed him such 
favour and affection as his father's years of faithful / 
service had never drawn from her. But her / 
favour was severely tried when Philip set him- ' 
self to oppose her marriage with the Duke of ' 
Anjou, brother to the French king, and heir- I 
presumptive to his throne. The Duke was a 
Roman Catholic, and memories of the night of the 
Huguenot massacre doubtless strengthened Philip's 
opposition to the match. His uncle, Leicester, 

I 



130 IN SHAKSPERE'S ENGLAND 

was also against it, though from less lofty motives ; 
but the Earl was at this time out of favour with 
the Queen on account of the deed she could least 
brook among her favourites, that of his mar- 
riage. The chief furtherer of the proposed match 
among the English nobles was the unprincipled 
and reckless Earl of Oxford, and he and Sidney 
were sworn foes. Fulke Greville gives a quaint 
account of a quarrel which took place between 
them in 1579, and which only the personal influ- 
ence of the Queen saved from resulting in a duel. 
The quarrel began in a tennis-court, where 
Philip was playing, when the Earl entered and 
ordered him roughly to vacate the court. This 
Philip refused to do, and each grew angry, for 
Philip's temper was hot when roused ; then the 
Earl did, as Fulke Greville writes, " scornfully 
call Sir Philip by the name of puppy. In which 
progress of heat," he goes on to say, "as the 
tempest grew more and more vehement within, 
so did their hearts breathe out their perturba- 
tions in a more loud and shrill accent. The 
French Commissioners, unfortunately, had that day 
audience in those private galleries, whose windows 
looked into the tennis-court. They instantly drew 
all to this tumult : every sort of quarrels sorting 
well with their humours, especially this. Which 



SIR PHILIP SIDNEY 131 

Sir Philip perceiving, and rising with an inward 
strength by the prospect of a mighty faction 
against him, asked my lord with a loud voice 
that which he heard clearly enough before. Who 
(like an echo that still multiplies by reflections) 
repeated this epithet of puppy the second time. 
Sir Philip, resolving in one answer to conclude 
both the attentive hearers and passionate actor, 
gave my lord a lie." 

But it was Philip who first remembered "the 
foreign and factious spirits that attended, and, 
yet even in this question between him and his 
superior, tender of his country's honour, with 
some words of sharp accent, led the way abruptly 
out of the tennis-court." 

Here, and in other cases, Philip showed that 
he had a fiery temper when roused, but the 
serenity of his nature was such that he usually 
kept his passions well under control. 

His feelings against the French marriage were 
so strong, and his nature was so incapable of 
being awed, even by the mighty Elizabeth, into 
acquiescence in what his conscience disapproved, 
that he drew up a memorial upon the subject, 
expressing his views clearly and boldly. This 
he presented to the Queen, addressing her as 
" Most Feared and Beloved, Most Sweet and 



132 IN SHAKSPERE'S ENGLAND 

Gracious Sovereign," and offering no excuse for 
his plain speaking, or, as he writes, " carrying no 
other olive branch of intercession than the laying 
of myself at your feet ; nor no other insinuation, 
either for attention or pardon, but the true vowed 
sacrifice of unfeigned love." 

But plain speaking, especially on the subject 
of her oft-projected matrimonial alliances, was 
ill-brooked by Elizabeth, even from one so high 
in her favour as Sidney, and he was obliged to 
retire from Court for more than half a year. 

It was about this time that his literary work 
seems chiefly to have been done. It comprised 
the " Arcadia," a romance, " Astrophel and Stella," 
a Sonnet Series, interspersed with songs, and an 
able and brilliant essay entitled " The Defence 
of Poesy." His works were not published during 
his lifetime, for he seemed to think but meanly 
of his own literary gifts, but the world has judged 
otherwise. 

The " Arcadia " is a lengthy tale, involved and 
somewhat heavy, to modern ideas, but it was 
a favourite romance for a long time, and there 
is much in it to be admired by all students of 
literature. It was written while staying with his 
sister Mary, the Countess of Pembroke, and is 
dedicated to her. 



SIR PHILIP SIDNEY 133 

The name Arcadia, and the idea of the happy 
pastoral country, was taken by Sidney from the 
writings of the ItaHan Sannazzaro, but the char- 
acters with which he peopled the land were his 
own creations. 

The sad shepherd, Phillisides, is himself, under 
a Latinised form of his own name. The story is 
that of two devoted cousins, Musidorus, Prince 
of Thessalia, and Pyrocles, Prince of Macedon, 
who passed through most of the adventures of 
mediaeval romance. The scene opens with a 
shipwreck, Pyrocles is carried off by pirates, and 
Musidorus is led by two shepherds to the fair 
land of Arcadia, where " there were hills which 
garnished their proud heights with stately trees: 
humble vallies, whose bare estate seemed com- 
forted with the refreshing of silver rivers : 
meadows enamelled with all sorts of eye-pleasing 
flowers ; . . . each pasture stored with sheep, 
. . . here a shepherd's boy piping, as though 
he should never be old : there a young shepherdess 
knitting, and withal singing ; and it seemed that 
her voice comforted her hands to work, and her 
hands kept time to her voice-music." 

The Prince of this fair land has two daughters 
Pamela and Philoclea, both beautiful and virtuous 
maidens, who eventually wed the two wandering 



134 IN SHAKSPERE'S ENGLAND 

princes, after many terrible adventures and com- 
plications ; but the finest thing in the whole 
romance is the prayer which Sidney puts into 
the mouth of Pamela in her imprisonment, and 
which is said to have been used on the scaffold by 
Charles I. It might almost have been composed 
for that tragic scene. " O All-seeing Light and 
Eternal Life of all things, to whom nothing is 
either so great that it may resist, or so small that 
it is contemned, look upon my misery with Thine 
eye of mercy, and let Thine infinite power vouch- 
safe to limit out some proportion of deliverance 
unto me, as to Thee shall seem most convenient. 
Let not injury, O Lord, triumph over me, and 
let my faults by Thy hand be corrected, and 
make not my unjust enemy the minister of Thy 
justice. But yet, my God, if, in Thy wisdom, 
this be the aptest chastisement for my inexcusable 
folly, if this low bondage be fitted for my over 
high desires, if the pride of my not enough 
humble heart be thus to be broken, O Lord, I 
yield unto Thy will, and joyfully embrace what 
sorrow Thou wilt have me suffer. Only thus 
much let me crave of Thee : let my craving, 
O Lord, be accepted of Thee, since even that 
proceeds from Thee ; let me crave, even by the 
noblest title which in my greatest affliction I 



SIR PHILIP SIDNEY 135 

may give myself, that I am Thy creature, and 
by Thy goodness, which is Thyself, that Thou 
wilt suffer some beam of Thy majesty so to shine 
into my mind that it may still depend confidently 
on Thee. Let calamity be the exercise, but not 
the overthrow of my virtue ; let their power 
prevail, but prevail not to destruction. Let my 
greatness be their prey ; let my pain be the 
sweetness of their revenge ; let them, if so it 
seem good unto Thee, vex me with more and 
more punishment ; but, O Lord, let never their 
wickedness have such a hand, but that I may 
carry a pure mind in a pure body." 

This prayer we give in full, partly on account of 
its devotional beauty, and partly as a specimen of 
the simplicity and grace of Sidney's writing. 

There is much that is beautiful and rhythmical 
in the sonnets of " Astrophel and Stella," and much 
of the passion of true love poetry. They are ad- 
dressed to Penelope Devereux, who was betrothed 
to Sidney, but instead of marrying him became 
the wife of a worldly and bad man. Lord Rich. 
There seems no very clear reason why the earlier 
marriage did not take place, especially as the Earl 
of Essex, Penelope's father, was in favour of it. 
The most general view seems to be that Sidney 
was busied in other matters, and only discovered 



136 IN SHAKSPERE'S ENGLAND 

his real feelings towards Penelope when she was 
beyond his reach. 

These sonnets and lyrics are a study in them- 
selves, and ill bear scattered quotations: the best 
known probably is that beginning, " My true love 
hath my heart," but as a specimen, we will give that 
in which he begs for the gift of sleep, that he may 
lose, for a time, the sense of his own grief. 

" Come, sleep ! O sleep, the certain knot of peace, 

The waiting-place of wit, the balm of woe, 
The poor man's wealth, the prisoner's release, 

Th' indifferent judge between the high and low ! 
With shield of proof shield me from out the press 

Of those fierce darts despair at me doth throw ; 
O make in me those civil wars to cease ; 

I will good tribute pay, if thou do so. 
Take thou of me smooth pillows, sweetest bed, 

A chamber deaf of noise and blind of light, 
A rosy garland and a weary head ; 

And if these things, as being thine in right. 
Move not thy heavy grace, thou shalt in me. 
Livelier than elsewhere, Stella's image see." 

"The Defence of Posey" is a masterly essay, 
couched in pure and beautiful language ; Sidney's 
ideal of the poet is a lofty one, and his illustration all 
the more forcible from its homely simplicity. The 
poet " commeth to you," he says, "with a tale which 
holdeth children from play, and old men from the 
chimney-corner ; and, pretending no more, doth 
intend the winning of the mind from wickedness 



SIR PHILIP SIDNEY 137 

to virtue." And of the historian he speaks as one 
who is " better acquainted with a thousand years 
ago, than with the present age, and yet better 
knowing how this world goeth, than how his own 
wit runneth ; curious for antiquities, and inquisi- 
tive of novelties ; a wonder to young folks, and a 
tyrant in table-talk." 

Such were the works on which Sidney employed 
himself while absent from the Court, and which 
drew him near in close companionship to all the 
brilliant band of literary men growing up at the 
time. It was an age, indeed, of great Englishmen. 
Spenser was born but one year, and Raleigh two 
years before Sidney. With Spenser Sidney must 
have had much in common, and of Raleigh's New 
World he longed to be an explorer, but this the 
despotic Queen would not allow, though he went 
so near it as to go on board with Sir Francis 
Drake, in the hope of sailing with him. But 
Elizabeth thought that her courtiers were best 
at Court, and for a time she had him home 
again. 

In 1583 she knighted him, and in Sep- 
tember of the same year he married Frances 
Walsingham, whose father had been ambassador 
in Paris at the time of the Huguenot massacre. 

Of the marriage we know little, except that a 



138 IN SHAKSPERE'S ENGLAND 

daughter was born to him two years before his 
death, and that his wife was with him at the end. 

In 1585 the Queen made up her mind to send 
troops to the assistance of the Netherlands against 
Spain, and these she sent under the command of 
the Earl of Leicester. His nephew Sidney was to 
accompany him, and was to hold the post of 
Governor of Flushing. 

That last year of his life is the best known. 
First came the short military triumph, in which he 
led the worn and half-starved soldiers, already 
stationed in the country, to the successful storming 
of the little town of Axel, and was rewarded by 
receiving the rank of Colonel. 

Then on the 13th of August the English and 
their allies surrounded the town of Zutphen by 
land and water. News reached them that a convoy 
of provisions was on its way to the besieged city, 
and on the morning of the 22nd Sidney rode out 
at the head of two hundred men to surprise and cut 
off the supplies. The thick mist of early morning 
covered the ground, and when it suddenly dispersed 
the little band of English found themselves face to 
face with a thousand horsemen, and full in firing 
range of the town. Again and again they charged ; 
Sidney's horse was killed under him, and he took 
another ; in the third charge he was wounded by a 



SIR PHILIP SIDNEY 139 

bullet in the left leg, which broke the bone and 
lodged in the thigh ; his horse took fright, and 
galloped from the field, and he was presently 
carried to his uncle's station. 

It was while being taken there that the incident 
occurred with which his memory is always linked. 
His friend, Fulke Greville, tells the gallant tale : 
" In which sad progress, passing along by the rest 
of the army, where his uncle the General was, and 
being thirstie with excess of bleeding, he called for 
drink, which was presently brought him ; but as 
he was putting the bottle to his mouth, he saw a 
poor Souldier carryed along, who had eaten his last 
at the same Feast, gastly casting up his eyes at the 
bottle. Which Sir Philip perceiving, took it from 
his head, before he drank, and delivered it to the 
poor man, with these words, ' Thy necessity is yet 
greater than mine.' " 

Verily the cup of cold water given for the love 
of Christ ! And with this last act of Christian 
chivalry Sidney passes from the stage of public 
life. 

But as heroic in its way as that unfading deed 
of charity, was the patient courage with which for 
three weeks he lay upon his bed of pain at 
Arnheim. With the skill of modern surgery his 
wound would probably have been quickly healed, 



I40 IN SHAKSPERE'S ENGLAND 

but it was otherwise in those days ; and we shrink 
from the thought of the repeated operations, so 
bravely borne, by which the doctors sought to 
save him. 

His wife was with him, and his two brothers, 
and his spiritual adviser and friend, George Gifford. 

He longed to live, and sent a pathetic little 
letter to another of his friends, John Wier, a cele- 
brated physician, begging him to come to him 
without delay. 

" Mi Wiere, veni, veni. — De vita periclitor et 
te cupio. Nee vivus, nee mortuus, ero ingratus. 
Plura non possum, sed obnixe oro ut festines. 
Vale. — Tuus, Ph. Sidney." 

" My dear Friend Wier, — Come, come. I 
am in peril of my life, and long for you. 
Neither living nor dead shall I be ungrateful. I 
cannot write more, but beg you urgently to hurry. 
Farewell. — Yours, Ph. Sidney." 

But Wier arrived too late. 

Sidney's mind was active to the last ; he made 
his will, and took leave of his friends, bidding 
farewell to his weeping brother Robert in the 
famous words, " Love my memory, cherish my 



SIR PHILIP SIDNEY 141 

friends ; their faith in me may assure you they 
are honest. But above all, govern your will and 
affections by the will and word of your Creator ; 
in me beholding the end of this world with all her 
vanities." 

His great wish was to pass away in full posses- 
sion of his senses, and this was granted to him. 
He had fought against the fear of death, and 
overcome it, and shortly before the end he said 
to Gifford, " I would not exchange my joy for the 
empire of the world." 

When his friend, kneeling at his side, saw that 
speech was passed, he whispered in his ear, " Sir, 
if you can hear what I say, and if you still have 
your inward joy and consolation in God, hold up 
your hand." 

And the dying knight raised both hands to 
heaven, in token of that joy which had been with 
him throughout the whole of his short life, and 
which did not fail him at the end. 

So died Sir Philip Sidney, the most perfect 
Christian knight of the Court of Queen Elizabeth. 

He was mourned with passionate grief through- 
out England, and his body was borne with military 
honours to his ship the Black Prince^ and so taken 
back to London, and amid a sorrowing crowd he 
was laid to rest in the church of old St. Paul's, 



142 IN SHAKSPERE'S ENGLAND 

where now there spreads above his ashes " the 
dome of the golden cross." 

Of the many lines to his memory, none form 
a more fitting farewell than those written by his 
friend Sir Walter Raleigh : — 

" England doth hold thy limbs, that bred the same ; 
Flanders thy valour, where it last was tried ; 
The camp thy sorrow, where thy body died ; 
Thy friends thy want ; the world thy virtues' fame." 



CHAPTER VIII 

SIR WALTER RALEIGH 

The stage on which men played their part in the 
age of Elizabeth seems to grow wider as we study 
the history of the time. 

We have Sir Thomas Gresham, in his busy 
world of finance, working out problems for the 
good of his fellow-citizens, in a world that went 
no farther than the distance from London to 
Antwerp ; then we have Bacon, in his effort 
to rise always into the larger life of European 
politics ; and Sidney, who bore abroad the ideal of 
English chivalry, and laid down his life upon a 
foreign battle-field ; and beyond them all, forth 
into a land which his genius discovered, and from 
which his heart never swerved, moved the figure 
of Sir Walter Raleigh. 

If Sidney were the true picture of the Eliza- 
bethan soldier-hero, Raleigh was its ideal sailor. 

Sea-bred from his youth, on the wild Devon- 
shire coast, and with the influence of his famous 

half-brother. Sir Humphrey Gilbert, to quicken his 

143 



SIR WALTER RALEIGH 145 

from him how to put into words the longings 
with which the sea filled his heart. 

A handsome lad he must have been, with the 
proud bearing that he never lost ; tall, active, and 
well-knit in frame, with long straight nose, dark 
eyes, and thick, dark hair. 

Perhaps his gifts were too many to make him 
altogether successful in life, but certainly few men 
have ever lived who possessed such versatility of 
genius. 

He was both sailor and soldier ; explorer, in a 
sense far beyond that of a mere adventurer ; states- 
man, poet, historian, and alchemist ; so many- 
sided is his life, that it is almost bewildering to 
try to see it as a whole ! 

His ideas were in advance of his Age, and he 
had the misfortune to live into the reign of the 
Scotch James, by whom such a nature as his could 
never have been understood. 

At the age of fourteen Walter Raleigh went to 
Oxford, and studied there at Oriel College, and 
probably also at Christ Church. Anthony a Wood 
tells us that Raleigh, being " strongly advanced by 
academical learning at Oxford, under the care of an 
excellent tutor, became the ornament of the juniors, 
and a proficient in oratory and philosophy." 

From Oxford he went abroad, and fought in 



146 IN SHAKSPERE'S ENGLAND 

France under the banner of the Huguenots, and 
later in the Netherlands, and after some time 
spent in London, at the Court, he went on one 
of Humphrey Gilbert's expeditions to America 
in 1578. 

Two years later he led a band of a hundred 
men to join in the subjugation of Munster, 
which was being attempted by the ministers of 
the Queen in the high-handed style of the day. 
Elizabeth was alarmed at the Irish having re- 
ceived help from Spain, and the result was the 
terrible massacre of the Spanish garrison of 
Smerwick, at which Raleigh was present and in 
which he assisted. 

But a pleasanter feature in his Irish life than 
the harsh measures which he always advocated 
towards the Queen's foes was his friendship 
with his great contemporary, the poet Edmund 
Spenser, who had come to Ireland as secretary 
to the Lord Deputy, Earl Grey, and whom now 
Raleigh met for the first time. 

Men were both poets and soldiers at that 
time, and it is a curious contrast to think of 
Raleigh and Spenser discussing such themes as 
the "Faerie Queene" and "Colin Clout" in the 
intervals of doing their best to exterminate the 
wretched peasant population of Munster. 



SIR WALTER RALEIGH 147 

There were no half measures in the warfare 
of Elizabeth's time. 

On Raleigh's return to Court his favour with 
the Queen increased rapidly. Among the personal 
tastes he shared with her was that of extrava- 
gance in dress, and even among the gorgeous 
figures of that Court he shone conspicuous in 
gold and jewellery, wearing even upon his shoes 
gems of priceless value. 

Some of the tales of his intercourse with the 
exacting Virgin Queen are none the less sugges- 
tive that they are not quite authentic. The best 
known, as given by Fuller, is how " Her Majesty, 
meeting with a plashy place, made some scruple 
to go on ; when Raleigh (dressed in the gay 
and genteel habit of those times) presently cast 
off and spread his new plush cloak on the 
ground, whereon the Queen trod gently over, 
rewarding him afterwards with suits for his so 
free and seasonable tender of so fair a footcloth." 
Whether accurate or not, this is just one of the 
pretty deeds of personal devotion by which the 
great men of the day were always ready to feed 
that most insatiable quality, the vanity of Queen 
Elizabeth. 
^ In another story which Fuller tells, the Queen 
got the better of her courtier, for finding a 



148 IN SHAKSPERE'S ENGLAND 

legend, cut by Sir Walter with his diamond ring 
upon a window-pane, which said — 

" Fain would I climb, but that I fear to fall," 

Elizabeth inscribed beneath it the reply — 

" If thy heart fail thee, then climb not at all." 

His ready wit, his brilliancy, and his wide 
general knowledge made him such a companion 
as the Queen most prized, and he was first 
favourite at Court for some years, and suffered, 
just as Sidney did, from the inconvenience of 
the position, by being kept close to the side of 
his mistress, when he would fain have been up 
and doing further afield. 

In 1583 Sir Humphrey Gilbert started on his 
last expedition, and Raleigh longed to accompany 
him, but was allowed by the Queen to do no 
more than fit up a ship, which he christened the 
Ark Raleigh. Sir Humphrey never came home. 
On the return voyage, bad as the weather was, 
he insisted on sailing in the smaller of his two 
vessels — a mere boat, according to modern ideas, 
and quite unfit for the passage of the Atlantic : 
though a less prominent figure than Sidney on 
the grand stage of the time, his exit is hardly 
less fine. He was seen for the last time by the 



SIR WALTER RALEIGH 149 

crew of his larger ship, which survived, looking 
out undismayed over the face of the waters 
which were so soon to be his grave, and his 
last words have found an echo in the heart 
of many a shipwrecked mariner. " Be of good 
heart, my friends! Heaven is as near us by 
sea as by land," cried Sir Humphrey, as they 
drifted to their death on the cold Newfoundland 
coast. 

Gilbert had held letters patent from the Queen 
for the colonisation of the east coast of America, 
and these were continued to his half-brother, 
Raleigh, who sent out two ships during the next 
year to exlplore the coast above Florida. The 
land they discovered the Queen called Virginia, 
in honour of her own state of life, though she 
was at the time a somewhat mature virgin of 
fifty-one ! 

These discoveries were dear to the heart of 
Elizabeth, for in three different ways they minis- 
tered to her wishes : they carried her name and 
fame beyond the seas ; they brought her tribute 
in gold, and pearls " as large as peas," and her love 
of wealth increased each year ; and they led to 
continual infringement of the rights of her enemy 
the King of Spain, who was the other great 
colonising power of the day. 



I50 IN SHAKSPERE'S ENGLAND 

Besides his ships fitted out from time to time for 
these voyages of exploration, Raleigh kept a small 
fleet of his own for purposes of commerce and 
privateering ; with these he harassed and con- 
stantly robbed the Spanish treasure-ships coming 
to and from the Indies, 

Towards the constant expense of these expe- 
ditions the Queen helped him in many ways. 
She granted him a licence to export the famous 
broadcloth made in his own west country ; she 
gave him property in the south of Ireland, 12,000 
acres of the land which had been taken from the 
Irish — forfeited land as it was called ; she made 
him Lord Warden of the Stannaries, which meant 
that he had to do justice in Devonshire among his 
own people ; and she made him Vice-Admiral of 
Cornwall and Devon ; and at Court, Captain of 
the Queen's Guard. It was characteristic alike 
of her vanity and thrift that the last office 
was honorary, and was supposed to be its own 
reward. 

Raleigh's great rival in the Queen's favour was 
Essex, at this time a handsome youth of twenty, 
kinsman to Elizabeth through her mother, and 
loved by her with a passionate fondness, some- 
thing between the feeling of a lover and a grand- 
mother. 



SIR WALTER RALEIGH 151 

Essex writes, " I told her (the Queen) that 
what she did was only to please that knave 
Raleigh, for whose sake I saw she would both 
grieve me and my love, and disgrace me in the 
eye of the world. From thence she came to 
speak of Raleigh ; and it seemed she could not 
well endure anything to be spoken against him ; 
and taking hold of my word ' disdain,' she said 
there was ' no such cause why I should disdain 
him.' ... I spake, with grief and choler, as much 
against him as I could ; and I think he, standing 
at the door, might very well hear the worst that I 
spoke of himself." 

We can imagine how Raleigh, standing at the 
door as Captain of the Guard, in his gorgeous 
orange uniform, would ridicule and despise the 
jealousy of the passionate lad. 

In 1585 he sent out seven vessels, commanded 
by his cousin. Sir Richard Grenville, and they 
planted a small colony of 105 men on the island 
of Roanoake ; but the next year Drake brought 
the colonists back to England, and with them they 
brought one of the chief gifts Englishmen owe to 
Raleigh — tobacco, and the knowledge of how to 
use it. Harrison, in his Chronicle of the time, says : 
" In these dales, the taking-in of the smoke of the 
Indian herbe called ' Tabaco,' by an instrument 



152 IN SHAKSPERE'S ENGLAND 

formed like a little ladell, whereby it passeth from 
the mouth into the hed and stomach, is gretlie 
taken up and used in England, against Rewmes 
and some other diseases ingendred in the longes 
and inward partes, and not without effect." But 
tobacco, from the first, was used for enjoyment 
quite as much as a remedy against illness. 

And in Gerard's " Herbal " there are twenty-five 
^^vertues" ascribed to the tobacco plant, among 
others the juice of the leaves may be taken as 
a remedy against cold, dropsy, ague, toothache, 
fits, gout, sciatica, and poison. Truly a valuable 
drug to possess in a household ! 

As to its introduction into England, Gerard says : 
<' There be two sorts or kindes of Tabaco, one 
greater, the other lesser ; the greater was brought 
into Europe out of the provinces of America, 
which we call the west Indies : the other from 
Trinidada, an Ilande neere unto the continent of 
the same Indies." He says also that " being now 
planted in the gardens of Europe, it prospereth 
very well . . . notwithstanding it is not so 
thought nor received of our Tabackians ; for ac- 
cording to the English proverbe. Far fetcht and 
deere bought is best for Ladies." 

Other plants he brought to England, and to his 
Irish lands in Munster, from the New Country on 



SIR WALTER RALEIGH 153 

which his thoughts were always set. Sir John 
Hennessy describes how " the richly-perfumed 
yellow wallflowers that he brought to Ireland 
from the Azores, and the Affane cherry, are still 
found where he first planted them by the Black- 
water. Some cedars he brought to Cork are to 
this day growing, according to the local historian, 
Mr. MacCarthy, at a place called Tivoli. The four 
venerable yew-trees, whose branches have grown 
and intermingled into a sort of summer-house 
thatch, are pointed out as having sheltered Raleigh 
when he first smoked tobacco in his Youghal 
garden. In that garden he also planted tobacco 
where the climate seemed to favour its cultivation. 
... A few steps further on ... is the famous spot 
where the first Irish potato was planted by him. 
In that garden he gave the tubers to the ancestors 
of the present Lord Southwell, by whom they were 
spread throughout the province of Munster." 

Many years after his time the name of Raleigh 
was favourably mentioned in College Green, when 
the Irish House of Commons contemplated en- 
couraging tobacco plantations in Ireland. The 
supposed necessity, however, of protecting tobacco 
planters in the colonies, and supporting the customs 
revenue of England, compelled the Lord-Lieutenant 
to veto any revival of Raleigh's scheme. 



154 IN SHAKSPERE'S ENGLAND 

One is tempted to ask if it is yet too late to at- 
tempt to introduce so important an industry into 
a country where fresh industries are so sorely 
needed ! 

While spending his time on his estates in 
Munster in doing his best to restore something 
like prosperity to the disturbed country, Raleigh 
had the pleasure of constant intercourse with 
Spenser, and of entering with his poet's nature 
into the composition of the " Faerie Queene." It 
was he who brought Spenser to Court in 1590, 
and presented him to Elizabeth, who com- 
manded the publication of the great poem, to 
which Raleigh prefixed an admirable sonnet of 
his own. 

But although he did not himself go to Virginia, 
again and again he fitted out his little fleets, and 
sent them to try to establish the colonies of which 
he always dreamed. 

In 1592 Raleigh lost the favour of the Queen 
through her discovery of his affection for one of 
her maids of honour, Elizabeth Throckmorton, 
whom he secretly married about this time. Such 
a secession from the ranks of her own admirers 
was punished by the Queen, then at the age of 
sixty, with imprisonment in the Tower, the hardest 
penalty she could inflict on such a nature as 



SIR WALTER RALEIGH 155 

Raleigh's. Though he was soon released, his 
favour at Court was over for the present, and he 
had leisure to turn his thoughts again to the dis- 
covery of his El Dorado. 

But first came a few peaceful happy years at 
Sherbourne, his home in Dorsetshire ; there he 
and his dearly loved and loving wife spent their 
time, and there the third Walter Raleigh was born 
in 1594. Raleigh was always busy ; he im- 
proved his property, he read and wrote, and 
carried on his work both in Devonshire and 
Ireland. 

But England could not hold him always, and 
in spite of his wife's letter to Sir Robert Cecil 
begging him to " rather draw for Walter towards 
the east than help him forward toward the sun- 
set," it was into the sunset that he sailed in 
February 1595, on his first voyage of discovery 
to Guiana. 

Mr. Gosse thus gives the origin of El Dorado : 
"As early as 1539 a brother of the great Pizarro 
had returned to Peru with a legend of a prince of 
Guiana whose body was smeared with turpentine 
and then blown upon with gold dust, so that he 
strode naked among his people like a majestic 
golden statue. This prince was El Dorado, the 
Gilded One. But as time went on this title was 



156 IN SHAKSPERE'S ENGLAND 

transferred from the monarch to his kingdom, or 
rather to a central lake hemmed in by golden 
mountains in the heart of Guiana." 

It was this golden country that Raleigh coveted, 
partly for its own worth, but largely so that it 
might not fall to the lot of his hated rivals the 
Spanish explorers and adventurers. 

He tells the tale of his journey in his " Discovery 
of Guiana," which he published shortly after his 
return. 

He landed first at Trinidad, where the natives 
came to him with complaints of the cruelty of the 
Spanish Governor Berreo, and Raleigh made a 
prisoner of him, and used him to get information 
as to the geography of the country. They left 
the ships at Trinidad, and crossed the Serpent's 
Mouth in boats, and then started to explore the 
mouths of the Orinoco. The natives met them 
doubtfully ; " but when they perceived," says 
Raleigh, "that we offered them no violence, . . . 
they then began to show themselves on the bank's 
side, and offered to traffic with us for such things 
as they had." 

All through the expedition Raleigh treated the 
natives with justice and humanity, and exacted 
the same behaviour towards them from his com- 
panions. 



SIR WALTER RALEIGH 157 

He took with him an Indian pilot, and from 
him, and from the different chiefs with whom 
they made friends, they learned much about the 
customs of the people of Guiana ; and strange 
habits are ascribed to some of them. The 
Capuri, for instance, who dwell on the small 
river after which they are called, than whom, 
Raleigh says, " I never beheld a more goodly or 
better favoured people, or a more manly." Their 
custom when their Cazique dies is to wait until 
such a time as " they think the flesh is fallen from 
the bones, then they take up the carcase again 
and hang it in the Cazique's house that died, and 
deck his skull with feathers of all colours, and 
hang all his gold plates about the bones of his 
arms, thighs, and legs." And the Arwacas, who 
dwell south of the Orinoco, and " do use to beat 
the bones of their lords into powder, and their 
wives and friends drink it in their several sorts of 
drinks." 

On the banks of these rivers, Raleigh writes, 
" were divers sorts of fruit, good to eat, flowers ^ 
and trees of that variety as were sufficient to 
make ten volumes of herbals. We relieved our- 
selves many times with the fruits of the 
country, and sometimes with fowl and fish ; we 
saw birds of all colours, some carnation, some 



v/ 



158 IN SHAKSPERE'S ENGLAND 

crimson, orange tawny, purple, green." And 
'<on both sides of this river we passed the most 
beautiful country that ever mine eyes beheld." 
How much must Raleigh, with the love of 
splendour and colour that his dress alone showed 
so plainly, have enjoyed this wealth of tropical 
beauty ! ,^ 

After a journey of a fortnight they came to the 
main stream of the great Orinoco, and there they 
anchored and feasted with a friendly native chief 
before starting to explore further. Of the chief's 
wife, Raleigh writes ; " She was of good stature, 
with black eyes, fat of body, of an excellent 
countenance, her hair almost as long as herself, 
tied up again in pretty knots, and it seemed she 
stood not in that awe of her husband as the rest, 
for she spake and discoursed, and drank among 
the gentlemen and captains, and was very 
pleasant, knowing her own comeliness, and taking 
great pride therein. I have seen a lady in 
England so like her, as but for the difference in 
colour I would have sworn might have been the 
same." 

It would have interested us to know the name 
of the " lady in England," but as Raleigh in- 
tended his work for publication, he doubtless 
thought it a delicate matter to compare one of 



SIR WALTER RALEIGH 159 

the Elizabethan beauties to this attractive but 
dusky lady. 

Journeying on up the river they reached the 
great waterfall now named Salto Caroni, where 
he says : " We beheld that wonderful breach 
of waters which ran down Caroli ; . . . there 
appeared some ten or twelve overfalls in sight, 
every one as high over the other as a church 
tower." And he is induced by his companions to 
further explore by land, instead of returning to 
the boats as he wished, being, as he expresses it 
in the delightful English of the time, but " a very 
ill footman." 

There they found quartz filled with the shining 
ore that raised their hopes again as to the near- 
ness of that land of gold on which their hearts 
were set. 

But they could not go much further up the 
river, as the storms of winter were approaching, 
and life in an open boat became harder each day 
to endure. 

'< Our men," he says, " began to cry out for 
want of shift, for no man had place to bestow 
any other apparel than that which he wore on 
his back, and that was thoroughly washed on 
his body for the most part ten times in one 
day." 



i6o IN SHAKSPERE'S ENGLAND 

So they returned down the river, having 
friendly meetings with Indians on their way, 
making terms of alliance with them, and leaving 
amongst other tokens of goodwill "many more 
pieces of gold than I received of the new 
money of twenty shillings with her Majesty's 
picture to wear, with promise that they would 
become her servants thenceforth." 

And then with difficulty, for the storms were 
great, they came again to their ships at Trinidad, 
and Raleigh writes : " Now that it hath pleased 
God to send us safe to our ships, it is time to 
leave Guiana to the sun whom they worship." And 
this he did with high hopes of the promise which 
the country offers to those who take it for their 
own. His eyes were still blinded by the love of 
gold, which he saw in every glittering stone or 
sunlit mountain, and which he coveted, not so 
much for its own sake, as for the power over 
Spain which its possession would give to England ; 
but yet his wisdom saw too the other resources 
of the country. 

"All places yield abundance of cotton, of silk, 
of balsamum, and of those kinds most excellent, 
and never known in Europe ; of all sorts of gums, 
of Indian pepper. . . . The soil besides is so 
excellent, and so full of rivers, as it will carry 



SIR WALTER RALEIGH i6i 

sugar, ginger, and all those other commodities 
which the West Indies hath. 

'' And," he adds, " I am resolved that if there 
were but a small army afoot in Guiana, march- 
ing towards Manoa, the chief city of Juga, he 
would yield her Majesty by composition so many 
hundred thousand pounds yearly as should both 
defend all enemies abroad and defray all expenses 
at home." Such were Raleigh's hopes for the 
colonisation of Guiana. 

Soon after his return his thoughts were turned 
elsewhere by the naval battle against Spain in 
Cadiz harbour, of which we speak later, and in 
which his skill as a naval commander did much 
to win the day. 

His rivalry with Essex lasted till the Earl's 
death upon the scaffold in 1601, when Raleigh 
waited near the scene of execution in hope, as 
he says himself, of a word of farewell, but was 
not in time to receive it. 

In 1603 his fortunes were changed, indeed, by 
the death of the Queen, who had, even when 
most angry with him, always known his worth. 

He was in the west of England when she 
died, and from the first his enemies got the 
new King's ear against him. Haughty and over- 
bearing in spite of his greatness, there were 

L 



i62 IN SHAKSPERE'S ENGLAND 

many at Court who were glad to see his favour 
wane. 

He could ill brook the change in his position, 
and joined with others more discontented than 
himself in resentment against the changes which 
James's accession brought about. The most fatal 
friendship he formed was that with Lord Cobham, 
who was deep in plans for dethroning James in 
favour of the Lady Arabella Stewart, the great- 
granddaughter of Margaret, Henry VIIL's sister. 

When the Main Plot, as it was called, was 
discovered, Cobham falsely accused Raleigh of 
being his accomplice in it, and after a trial held 
at Winchester, on account of an outbreak of the 
plague in London, he was condemned to death, 
and then lodged in the Tower, where he lived 
for twelve years with the death sentence hanging 
over his head. 

As the young Prince of Wales said, '' No one 
but my father would keep such a bird in a cage." 

His great " History of the World " was written 
during those weary years, and some papers besides, 
and he busied himself in chemical experiments, 
and in the manufacture of medicines ; but life, as 
he understood it, ended for him when the great 
gates clanged behind him on the i6th of De- 
cember 1603. They opened once again, twelve 



SIR WALTER RALEIGH 163 

years later, when the King's greed of gold led him 
to allow the great sailor to try one more search for 
his El Dorado, the gold mine in Guiana, in which 
he believed so firmly. But the story of that 
second voyage to Guiana is one of disaster from 
the beginning. Bad weather, sickness and death 
among their best and bravest, treachery on the 
part of one of the ship's masters, mutiny among 
the crew, and failing health and broken spirits in 
the great captain himself — so ran the tale. 

Raleigh had been expressly forbidden to inter- 
fere with any Spanish or other Christian colonists, 
and when he had a dispute with the Spaniards on 
one of the Canary Islands about water and pro- 
visions, the quarrel was reported and exaggerated 
at home, and his fate was sealed. 

The party pushed on across the ocean, and 
once more landed at Trinidad, but under what 
altered circumstances ! 

Raleigh was too ill himself to lead the second 
expedition up the Orinoco, but he sent as com- 
mander his old friend and comrade, Captain Key- 
mis, and with him his own son Walter. It was 
Keymis to whom fell the duty of returning to tell 
of the dire failure of the journey, No gold had 
been found, no discoveries made, in a fight with 
Spanish colonists young Walter Raleigh had been 



i64 IN SHAKSPERE'S ENGLAND 

killed ; such was the story, and the effect of his 
leader's grief and displeasure upon Keymis was so 
great that he went into his cabin after their inter- 
view, and committed suicide. 

Then came the sad homeward voyage of the 
old man, shattered in health, broken in spirit, and 
with now no hope before him. The end was not 
far off. His execution, on the old sentence which 
had never been revoked, was an easy way by 
which James could please the Spanish king, and 
Raleigh had no powerful friends left to plead 
for him. 

His faithful and broken-hearted wife vainly im- 
plored mercy for him from Sir Robert Cecil ; and 
Sidney's sister, the gentle Lady Pembroke, begged 
for his life from the King, but in vain. 

On October 29th, 16 18, the sentence was 
ordered to be carried out. 

" They brought him to the Palace gates at morn, 
His hair well greyed now, very tired and worn, 
With many years and battles, and great peace 
In those soft eyes that waited for release. 
Still straight and tall, with the old fearless air, 
And that strange beauty of his face, as fair 
As when in other days his name stood sweet 
In all men's ears, and at his lady's feet 
Men held him happy once, when hope was high: 
They brought the old man at the end to die. 
He who had fought their battles and set free 
For English ships the highways of the sea." 



SIR WALTER RALEIGH 165 

So gallant was his bearing on the scaffold, so 
earnestly did he thank God that he was brought 
out into the light to die, and so tenderly did he 
take leave of the friends who crowded round him, 
that Sir John Elyot writes : " It changed the affec- 
tion of his enemies, and turned their joy into 
sorrow, and all men else it filled with admiration, 
leaving no doubt but this, whether death was 
more acceptable to him, or he more welcome 
unto death." 

For twenty-five minutes he spoke, vindicating 
himself as a true and loyal subject of the Crown, 
and seeking pardon only from God, to Whom 
he asked all to join in prayer for him. " For 
I have been a soldier, a sailor, and a courtier, 
which are courses of wickedness and vice ; that 
His almighty goodness will forgive me; that He 
will cast away my sins from me ; and that He 
will receive me into everlasting life. So I take 
my leave of you all, making my peace with 
God." 

Perhaps his best remembered words upon the 
scaffold are those to the sheriff who asked him 
which way he would lie upon the block, '' What 
matter which way the head lies, so the heart be 
right." And then to the executioner, who was 
quite unnerved by the scene, '' Strike, man, what 



i66 IN SHAKSPERE'S ENGLAND 

dost thou fear ? " And before that he had said to 
him as he felt the axe, " It is a sharp medicine, 
but a sound cure for all diseases." 

And so once more into the sunset passed the 
greatest of Elizabeth's seamen. 



CHAPTER IX 

ELIZABETHAN SEAMEN 

We have followed Sir Walter Raleigh from his 
first voyage to his last, and now we must turn to 
the stirring tales of some of the seamen who led 
the way, or followed in his track. 

Hakluyt's '* Voyagers' Tales " give us many a 
story of the life on the seas, and the discovery of 
new lands by seamen whose very names are now 
forgotten ; such were John Fox, Thomas Sanders, 
Miles Phillips, of whom he tells in turn, and 
their lives we should study for ourselves, but 
here we have only space to speak of the few best 
known among those gallant " sea-dogs." Martin 
Frobisher, John Hawkins, Francis Drake, Richard 
Grenville, and John Davis, with these names at 
least all are familiar. 

There was no regular navy in the time to 

which these men belonged. Henry VIII. had 

built a small one, but it had been allowed to 

decay during the reigns of Edward VI. and Mary, 

so that it was to the ability and strength of private 

167 



i68 IN SHAKSPERE'S ENGLAND 

shipmasters that EHzabeth had to trust for help 
against her great Spanish enemy. 

Spain had done well in colonisation, and was 
constantly enriching herself by the merchandise 
brought home from her West Indian subjects. 
And Spain preserved by terribly rigid methods 
the old Catholic Religion, while in England the 
New Religion, or Protestantism, was daily becom- 
ing stronger. These two facts alone were enough 
to account for the bitter rivalry between the sea- 
men of each nation, who did not all go into the 
deep political questions which lay behind the 
rivalry, or think of Philip's wish to supplant the 
powerful Protestant Queen on her own throne by 
her poor Catholic captive Mary, Queen of Scots. 

Those were stirring times, and many a man 
who longed for fresh fields for his energy went 
forth to seek them beyond the sea in the new world 
of which men's minds were full. But throughout 
the most daring expeditions the hatred of their 
Spanish enemies was always with them, and the 
wish to avenge the cruel sufferings of old friends 
and comrades who had been taken prisoners by 
the Inquisitors and suffered the mysterious horrors 
of the Holy Office. 

Into those bays in Devon, from which came 
most of the boldest seamen, boats would come 



ELIZABETHAN SEAMEN 169 

with stories of the evil fate of some old fellow- 
sailor who had fallen into the hands of the 
Spaniards. 

These tales were enough to send out another 
band eager to discover, if possible, land and gold 
and fresh seas in which to trade and travel, but 
with the purpose ever deep in their hearts of 
avenging the fate of their comrades, and under- 
mining by every possible means the hated power 
of Spain. 

Elizabeth was shrewd and far-seeing, and her 
love of money grew with her years. She saw 
that to allow her great enemy's strength to be 
sapped by continual struggles with English ships 
was greatly to her advantage, especially as she 
possessed no official navy of her own. So she 
privately encouraged this petty warfare. It led to 
the weakening of Philip's naval power, and to the 
enrichment of her own coffers, for besides rich 
stores from foreign lands discovered by their own 
enterprise, her sailors often brought her home the 
wealth taken on the high seas from some great 
galleon ploughing its way home with a cargo of 
gold and pearls from the Spanish West Indian 
colonies. 

The deeds, therefore, of the Elizabethan seamen 
blend gallantry, enterprise, and bloodshed in one 



lyo IN SHAKSPERE'S ENGLAND 

vivid picture of life and colour which has never 
been surpassed at any time. 

Always before their eyes, and like Raleigh's El 
Dorado always eluding them, glowed the idea of 
the North-West Passage, and it was in search of 
this that the rugged Yorkshireman, Martin Fro- 
bisher, spent the greater part of his life. But he 
was poor, and for fifteen years he struggled to 
collect sufficient money to fit up the necessary 
ships. At last, in the year 1576, the Earl of War- 
wick came to his aid, and he was enabled to fit 
up his two small barques, of twenty and twenty- 
five tons, the Gabriel and the Michael^ which with a 
pinnace of ten tons formed his fleet. 

But such was the gallant spirit of the times 
that, as they passed on their way before the 
windows of the royal palace, the master of one of 
these wretched little barques writes, " We shot off 
an ordnance, and made the best show we could. 
Her Majesty, beholding the same, commended it, 
and bade us farewell, with shaking her hand at us 
out of the window." 

In about a month Frobisher made the coast of 
Greenland, and not far from thence he lost the 
company of his small pinnace, " which by means of 
the great storm he supposed to be swallowed up of 
the sea; also the other barque named the Michael, 




^r-p -^ a ^ -J- 



ELIZABETHAN SEAMEN 171 

mistrusting the matter, conveyed themselves privily 
away from him and returned home with great 
report that he was cast away." 

The weather was very severe and tempestuous, 
his mast was sprung, and his top-mast blown over- 
board, but he pressed on, and reached the ice- 
bound shores of the land north of Hudson's 
Straits. Then he came to the inlet just above the 
straits, and gave it his own name, and sailing some 
way up the strait he believed he had found the Pas- 
sage for which he sought. He was eager to take the 
news back to England, and to return next year with 
a better fleet, so he sailed home again, taking with 
him a piece of black stone, which was said to con- 
tain gold, and one of the native Indians, who, how- 
ever, died of cold just after his arrival in England. 

The hope of discovering gold roused many at 
home to help him in his second expedition, which 
started the following year, and in it sailed the 
Atd, a "tall ship," as Frobisher's friend Best 
writes, "of 200 tons, lent by the Queen herself." 
Nothing notable, however, was done by this band 
of men, though their spirit was such that Best tells 
how " one died at sea, which was sick before he 
came aboard, and was so desirous to follow his 
enterprise that he rather chose to die therein than 
not to be one to attempt so notable a voyage." 



172 IN SHAKSPERE'S ENGLAND 

Those words breathe the true spirit of Elizabethan 
seamen, a spirit which led them on to do such 
great deeds in their tiny craft. Nothing daunted 
by his want of success, and still led partly by 
the hope of finding gold on the coast, Frobisher 
took a third expedition the next year, again 
aided by the Queen, who took leave personally 
of all the captains, and bestowed upon the 
general the somewhat inappropriate gift for one 
starting on an Arctic voyage of a '^ fair chain of 
gold." 

Again they encountered storms and fog, and 
these dangers led to mutiny among the crew, some 
of whom declared that " they had as lief be hanged 
when they came home as without hope of safety 
to seek to pass and so to perish amongst the ice." 
But Frobisher, " not opening his ears to the 
peevish passion of any private person," continued 
his voyage, and " with incredible pain and peril at 
length got through the ice, and came to anchor in 
the Countess of Warwick's Sound, near the island 
from which they had taken the ore. Here they 
had a joyful meeting with some of their com- 
panions, whom they had deemed lost, and Best 
writes that "they highly praised God, and all 
together upon their knees gave Him due humble 
and hearty thanks, and Master Wolfall, a learned 



ELIZABETHAN SEAMEN 173 

man appointed by her Majesty's Council to be 
their minister and preacher, made unto them a 
godly sermon, exhorting them especially to be 
thankful to God for their strange and miraculous 
deliverance in these so dangerous places, and 
putting them in mind of the uncertainty of man's 
life, willed them to make themselves always ready 
as resolute men to enjoy and accept thankfully 
whatsoever adventure His divine providence should 
appoint." 

These words of the sailor-writer Best give a 
striking picture of the gallant little band, kneeling 
on the ice in prayer to the God who alone can 
keep the " wayfaring men, though fools," from 
" erring " on that great " highway " of the seas. 

But disappointment was again in store for them ; 
their ships had suffered much in the storms amid 
the icebergs, a great part had been lost of the 
portable wooden house they had brought out, and 
which they had intended as their winter shelter, 
and their provisions and drink ran short. So 
they stayed but to repair their shattered vessels, 
and to fill them with the delusive ore, and then 
sailed home again amid fresh storms and discom- 
forts. Whether Frobisher became discouraged 
after these repeated misfortunes, or whether funds 
were lacking for further ventures we do not know, 



174 IN SHAKSPERE'S ENGLAND 

but after this we know he sailed no more into the 
Northern Seas. 

While these explorations were being carried on 
off the coast of Greenland, another sea-venture 
was taking place off the west coast of Africa, and 
one which had more terrible results than its good 
leader Hawkins could have borne to contemplate. 
This was the beginning of the shipping of natives 
from the Guinea coast, to be sold as slaves to the 
Spaniards in the West Indies. 

John Hawkins was born, like Raleigh and 
Gilbert, on the Devonshire coast, and was bred 
to sea-trade from his boyhood, and it was as a 
trader, not an adventurer, that he made his name. 
He had, doubtless, early learned of the difficulties 
of procuring labourers in the West Indian plan- 
tations, owing to the rapid death of the native 
population, who seemed unfitted to bear the hard 
life of toil there under Spanish overseers. Hawkins 
conceived the idea of transplanting, for the work- 
ing of these valuable industries, some of the 
hardier race of natives from the west coast of 
Africa. The heathen " customs " practised there 
were barbarous, and his plan seems to have been 
to purchase natives who were to be sacrificed to 
the local deities, and to sell them instead as slaves 
in the West Indies, thereby giving them life 



ELIZABETHAN SEAMEN 175 

instead of death. But, even taking this view of 
the case, it seems to us that the weak point lay 
in the fact that other natives would promptly 
be provided to fill the place of those sold, as 
certainly powerful African tribes would not allow 
their " customs " to suffer. 

However this may be, John Hawkins founded 
the slave-trade as a useful and profitable industry, 
little thinking of the tears and blood that would 
be shed before the shameful work of which he 
was so recklessly laying the foundation could be 
undone, and the national stain removed. 

In 1526 Hawkins sailed to the Guinea coast 
with three ships, got possession by force and 
persuasion of three hundred negroes, and sold them 
as slaves among the planters in the West Indian 
islands, making a very large profit. 

His second expedition, undertaken in the follow- 
ing year, was supported by the Earls of Pembroke 
and Leicester, and these were the sailing orders 
issued to the crew : " Serve God daily, love one 
another, preserve your victuals, beware of fire, 
and keep good company." This time the negroes 
were less easily taken, but after some delay the 
necessary " cargo " was obtained, and the ships 
sailed on their way to the West Indies. But for 
eight days they were becalmed, which caused their 



176 IN SHAKSPERE'S ENGLAND 

provisions to run short, and illness broke out 
on board ; however, the end of their voyage was 
prosperous, and how little they realised the iniquity 
of the traffic upon which they were engaged is 
shown in the words of the contemporary narrator, 
who says, " But the Almighty God which never 
suffereth His elect to perish sent us on the i6th 
of February the ordinary breeze." 

But tidings of Hawkins's former voyage had 
reached Spain, and King Philip had sent orders 
prohibiting any Spanish trade with the slave-dealer 
in the West Indies. The planters, however, were 
only too willing to buy his wares, and so on this 
and subsequent expeditions it was an understood 
matter that he sent armed men on shore who were 
said to coerce the Spaniards into trading with him. 

It was after the second successful raid on the 
Guinea coast that Elizabeth granted Hawkins the 
coat-of-arms — shameful in our eyes — with the 
device of a captive and demi-bound Moor. But in 
1567 he sailed on what he called his " unfortunate 
voyage." After parting with about five hundred 
natives among the West Indian plantations, he was 
beset by very tempestuous weather, and had to take 
refuge in the Spanish port San Juan in Mexico. 
Unluckily for him a fleet had just been sent by 
Philip to capture him if possible, and these ships 



ELIZABETHAN SEAMEN 177 

arrived at San Juan soon after the English vessels 
had entered the harbour. Hawkins refused to let 
the Spaniards through the narrow opening by the 
harbour-bar until he had extorted a promise that he 
should be unmolested ; but the Dons broke faith, 
attacked the English, damaged their ships, and 
sunk or seized all the treasure — the price of the 
five hundred natives which they were taking home. 
Hawkins, and his young cousin, Francis Drake, 
barely escaped with their lives. Drake got first 
to England and told the tale of Spanish treachery 
at Court, and after a voyage full of hardships and 
dangers, Hawkins, too, reached home. He thus 
ends the tale of his " unfortunate voyage." 
" If all the miseries and troublesome affairs of 
this sorrowful voyage should be perfectly and 
thoroughly written, there should need a painful 
man with his pen and as great a time as he 
had that wrote the lives and deaths of the 
martyrs." 

From these slave-trading voyages let us turn 
now to the adventures of that young cousin, 
Francis Drake, who accompanied Hawkins on his 
last ill-fated expedition, and whose title to fame 
is that of being the first man to sail round the 
world. 

Drake was the son of Edward Drake, of Tavi- 

M 



178 IN SHAKSPERE'S ENGLAND 

stock, in Devon, a staunch Protestant, who had 
fled from his native place to avoid persecution, 
and had become a chaplain in Henry VIII.'s fleet 
in the Medway. 

Francis was bred from boyhood as a sailor, 
but, unlike Hawkins, not to trade or smuggling, 
but privateering, which was legal in the Middle 
Ages as a means of recovering debts or damages 
from the subjects of another nation. In the 
years between Hawkins's ** unfortunate voyage " 
and Drake's voyage round the world, the national 
indignation against Spain was constantly on the 
increase, though there was no formal breach 
between that country and England. During 
these years Drake avenged the treachery of the 
Spaniards at San Juan by various plundering 
expeditions to the American coast, holding rightly 
that the best way to injure Philip was by cutting 
off his supplies of gold and silver. 

On one of these expeditions, in February 1573, 
the Indians of Panama led him to the top of 
a lofty hill, where stood a tree of giant growth, 
in which steps were hewn for ascent. Drake 
climbed the tree, and from a stage constructed 
near the top he beheld for the first time the 
great Pacific Ocean, in which no English ship 
had ever yet sailed. He made up his mind at 




.^ al'rs Crcror canJiSc J-orti^ ,au: anacn^. 'Ducts ^raeck ad t-htuim Jvn^mcm aui 
toTo terrarum orbe , duorum aruiorwn, et tnenfaan drre-jn /pario , 'Z^cphiru Ajuen' 
films QV'cmnditcCo ^ingliamjedes pro^ruu-, 4 . Cal. Octott-^ aimo dpwcru ^trjt'^ 
ntr xsSo reiaJit cum antcA vffrtu jiha^et fd. ^eccmbr araa: IS77 . 

C-,e T>rtc^ eortraurt du CarpU-utac^Dracck. leaiul a cvaat route Jaterthe en trots 

aiauey mams Jxuk. mou- ec i5» tours tl parnt ebiT^oyaulme'JiJdiylrt-erre Je. tj 

JeTycccmtrc isTv ec ft/ijon retour aiuLct^^cyaulmc le 2,6 lear Je SerrC: if So. 

^d ^mpIiiSimuin et^Uu/li r^inan'^ .73 . Cdaardan Staffttrt ap»d 

J-fcnricitm -J .Chri/T-: TraTtC:''^^c^rm. le^atum'~C) . S . Oi/crwtniyS . 

7c{K.utci T^tnxit-. 'T~ homos de leufcuipjlt et excttdit . 



^. 



ELIZABETHAN SEAMEN 179 

once to be the pioneer of England in these 
new waters, but it was four years before he 
could accomplish his project. On the 15th of 
November 1577, he sailed from England with 
a little fleet of five ships, of which the largest 
was the famous Pelican, of 100 tons, and in the 
following April he reached the coast of Brazil. 
He then turned his course south-east, along the 
coast of America, until he came to the entrance 
of the Straits of Magellan, where he changed 
the name of the Pelican to the Golden Hind, 
which was the crest of his patron. Sir Charles 
Hatton. 

They made the passage in sixteen days, which 
was only half the time it had taken Magellan, 
and then they came forth into the Pacific amid 
furious gales. 

The Golden Hind was now alone ; one of the 
other ships had deserted, and the rest had been 
lost, but, nothing daunted, Drake continued his 
course along the western coast of America. 
The Spaniards had never looked for any English 
adventurer on these waters, so the rich ports of 
Peru were undefended, and entirely at Drake's 
mercy. He made full use of his opportunities, 
sailing from place to place, and plundering the 
rich treasure-ships, which were only manned by 



i8o IN SHAKSPERE'S ENGLAND 

small mixed crews. He captured an immense 
booty, and at last, " thinking himself both in 
respect of the private injuries received from the 
Spaniards, as also of their contempts and in- 
dignities offered to our country and Prince in 
general, sufficiently satisfied and revenged," he 
determined to sail home. But he feared to 
return through the straits, lest the Spaniards 
should lie in wait for him and despoil him of 
his treasure, so he resolved to strike across the 
Pacific, round the Cape of Good Hope, and so 
back again to England. 

In order to get a favourable wind, he first 
sailed northwards to California, where he so won 
the hearts of the natives by his gifts of clothes 
and trinkets, that they put a crown on his 
head, and begged him to be their king. He 
took possession of the country in the Queen's 
name, and then when the winds were fair, he 
struck boldly out in his little ship across the 
great unknown ocean. Through the East Indian 
Islands he sailed, past the Cape of Good Hope, 
and so home to England, rich with gold and 
Spanish plunder, but richer still in the glory 
no man could take from him, of being the first 
to sail round the world. He was welcomed 
with great honour, and Elizabeth placed in her 



ELIZABETHAN SEAMEN i8i 

crown some of the rich jewels he offered her, 
and, apart from the daring of the enterprise, all 
men understood how valuable was the work 
Drake had done in opening for England a new 
passage for traders to India and beyond it, round 
the Cape of Good Hope. 

After this voyage matters grew more and more 
hostile between Spain and England ; Drake was 
allowed by the Queen to lead a fleet of twenty- 
five ships to plunder the Spanish ports in South 
America, and Philip began to make preparations 
for the sending forth of his " Invincible Armada." 
But before this set sail, the Spaniards were to 
suffer one more indignity at the hands of Drake 
in the famous " singeing of the Spanish King's 
beard." 

In April 1587, he sailed from Plymouth with 
thirty small barques, and rounded Cape St. Vincent 
on the fifth day. When opposite Cadiz harbour 
they could see the thick forest of masts, and the 
fleet which was being prepared to dispute with 
them the sovereignty of the sea. The daring enter- 
prise just suited Drake ; straight into the harbour 
he led the way, among the unprepared galleons 
of Philip, sinking the guardship, scattering the 
galleys, and shedding destruction and dismay on 
every side. The Duke of Medina Sidonia, who 



i82 IN SHAKSPERE'S ENGLAND 

was governor of the town, feared his landing, and 
hurried away to make preparations to prevent it. 
Meanwhile Drake, who had no intention of land- 
ing at all, did his work in the harbour in his usual 
effective manner, boarding the Spanish ships, 
plundering, burning, and cutting their cables, and 
when no more damage remained to be done, 
sailing out of the harbour, without loss of ship 
or man. 

He made his way back to Plymouth, burning 
the ships he met with off the Cape St. Vincent, on 
their way to bring stores to the Armada, and 
being fortunate enough to capture on the way 
the great San Philip, on her return from the 
West Indian Islands, " so richly loaded," it was 
said, "that every man in the fleet counted his 
fortune made." . 

His reception in England was enthusiastic, and 
in Spain such fearful honour was accorded him 
for the valour of his deeds, that it was said " if he 
was not a Lutheran there would not be the like 
of him in the world." And one Court lady who 
was invited by the King to join a party on a lake 
near Madrid, replied that she dared not trust 
herself '' on the water with his Majesty lest Sir 
Francis Drake should have her." 

Such was his reputation among his foes, and he 



ELIZABETHAN SEAMEN 183 

had the satisfaction of bearing his part the follow- 
ing year in the defeat of the Invincible Armada, of 
which we speak elsewhere. 

After such a life of brilliant and constant 
success it is undramatic that the end came 
to Drake in a moment of defeat. He and 
Hawkins had sailed in 1595 to try to conquer 
the Isthmus of Panama, but the Spaniards had 
learned wisdom from experience, and had their 
ports and towns now well fortified and garrisoned. 
So the expedition failed, and both the great sea- 
men died during its course, Hawkins first off 
Porto Rico, and Drake somewhat later off Porto 
Bello. 

Drake had lived a daring life of enterprise and 
discovery on the high seas, and had served his 
Queen and country well. When we consider his 
hatred of Spain, his inborn love of battle, and his 
loyalty to home, we feel that no words could be 
more appropriate as his farewell than those put 
into his mouth by a west country poet of our 
own day — 

"Rovin' tho' his death fell, he went wi' heart at ease, 
An' dreamin' arl the time o' Plymouth Hoe. 
' Take my drum to England, hang et by the shore, 

Strike et when your powder's runnin' low ; 
If the Dons sight Devon, I'll quit the port o' Heaven, 
An' drum them up the Channel as we drummed them 
long ago.' " 



i84 IN SHAKSPERE'S ENGLAND 

A fit comrade for him was Sir Richard Grenville, 
who dared Spain, with " his one little ship," in the 
year 1591, off the coast of the Azores. 

A little English fleet of twelve vessels, under 
the command of Lord Thomas Howard, was sur- 
prised suddenly by fifty-three Spanish ships. Sir 
Richard had ninety of his men sick on shore, 
and these he would not leave "to the thumb- 
screw and the stake, for the glory of the Lord." 

So he saw the other English ships sail away, 
while he was busy in bringing on board his sick 
men. And when the Spanish ships came on he 
faced them gallantly, " with his hundred fighters 
above, and his ninety sick below." 

No words can improve on Tennyson's magni- 
ficent telling of the tale of the *' fight between the 
one and the fifty-three." Sir Richard was blamed 
at the time for foolhardiness, but his wonderful 
sea-fight, and his gallant death on board the 
Spanish flag-ship to which the Dons had borne 
him, will live in history when saner exploits have 
been forgotten. 

The last of these great " sea-dogs " of whom 
we speak is John Davis, the man who so ably fol- 
lowed up the work of Frobisher, and who was by 
far the most systematic and scientific of the sea- 
men of his time. 



ELIZABETHAN SEAMEN 185 

He was a Devon man, a friend of Raleigh and 
Adrian Gilbert, and had grown up with them 
among the stirring sea-tales that were rife on the 
Devonshire coast, and from the first his heart was 
set on the discovery of Frobisher's North-West 
Passage. 

On July 20th, 1585, at the age of thirty, he 
started on his first voyage to the Arctic Regions, 
under the patronage of Elizabeth's secretary. Sir 
Francis Walsingham, of Raleigh, and of a great 
friend of Raleigh's, William Sanderson, who largely 
financed the expedition. 

It consisted of two ships, the Sunshine and the 
Moonshine, of 50 and 35 tons respectively, and 
the comfort of the crew had been considered in 
every way then possible by giving them thick 
woollen clothes, and laying in good stores of 
provisions, cod, salt meat, bread and cheese, 
butter, peas, and beer. 

Davis was a scientific explorer, and in his little 
cabin, among his few nautical books and im- 
perfect charts and instruments, he worked from 
the first as no mere maritime adventurer. He 
was " skilled and experienced," it was said, " in 
all a sailor's art, full of enthusiasm, brave and 
resolute. At the same time he was " — as most 
of the seamen were — " a God-fearing man, gentle 



i86 IN SHAKSPERE'S ENGLAND 

and courteous, considerate and thoughtful of the 
welfare of his crew, and beloved by his men — a 
very perfect specimen of an English sailor of the 
days of the great Queen." 

The expedition steered well south of Greenland, 
and so across the open Channel, and explored 
some way north of Frobisher's proposed settlement. 
Davis seemed to have no doubt of having dis- 
covered the Passage, mistaking for it one of the 
inlets on the north-east American coast ; and when, 
owing to their stores being nearly exhausted, 
he had to return home, he wrote to Sir Francis 
Walsingham that "the North- West Passage is 
a matter nothing doubtful, but at any time 
almost to be passed, the sea navigable, void 
of ice, the air tolerable, and the waters very 
deep." 

On his next expedition, though he had a 
larger ship added to his former two in the Mermaid, 
of 120 tons, he was not so fortunate ; they found 
this same Channel blocked with gigantic icebergs, 
along one of which, overshadowing them with its 
"capes, plateaux, and towering peaks," they sailed 
for thirteen days without finding an opening. 
The air was thick with fog, and midsummer 
though it was, the masts and rigging were coated 
with ice. The men began to lose heart, they 



ELIZABETHAN SEAMEN 187 

came to their captain, and, as he says himself, 
" very orderly with good discretion they entreated 
me to regard the safety of my own life, as well 
as the preservation of theirs, and that I should 
not through over-boldness leave their widows 
and fatherless children to give me bitter curses. 
Whereupon seeking counsel of God, it pleased 
His divine Majesty to move my heart to pro- 
secute that which I hope shall be to His 
glory and to the contentation of every Christian 
mind." 

The conduct on which he resolved was to send 
back his larger vessel, and in it all who wished to 
return, and to continue his own voyage in the 
Moonshine. 

This he did, and explored the western coast as 
far as Labrador, discovering Hudson's Strait, and 
so made his way back to England by the end of 
the year. 

On the third and last of his Arctic voyages Davis 
endeavoured to carry out the plan he had conceived 
of making these expeditions self-supporting, by 
sending two of his ships to join in the Greenland 
fisheries ; he himself continued the work of ex- 
ploration in a small pinnace of 20 tons called the 
Ellen. 

So unsound was this small craft, that once 



i88 IN SHAKSPERE'S ENGLAND 

again his sailors murmured, but he addressed 
them in stirring words, telling them that it was 
" better to die with honour, than to return with 
infamy ; " and so again they followed him. 

And with him they came, on the 30th of June, 
to that " utmost bourne " he ever reached on his 
way to the Pole, where rose above their heads the 
lofty perpendicular cliff which he christened in 
honour of his friend and patron, '* Sanderson, his 
Hope," because here seemed the best hope of a 
passage. North and west stretched a fair blue 
sea, dotted here and there with the peaks of a 
glittering iceberg ; east were the granite mountains 
of Greenland, and beyond them the white line of 
the world's greatest glacier ; above their heads rose 
the sheer wall of the mighty cliff, on whose sides 
thousands of wild sea-birds reared their young ; 
and around them was a sea of silver foam, break- 
ing the base of " Sanderson, his Hope," and almost 
seeming to disturb the majestic silence of that 
Northern sea. 

And before the winds broke which forced her 
to change her course, the sailor on the tiny 
pinnace had christened the island cliff for all 
time. 

With the morning, storms arose. Davis had to 
steer southward, exploring, according to his custom. 



ELIZABETHAN SEAMEN 189 

the coasts by which he passed, and alM'ays meeting 
the Eskimos in a friendly spirit. His account of 
the land was nearly as valuable at the time as that 
of the sea. He arrived back in Dartmouth on 
the 15th of September 1587, and landed with his 
men all " giving thanks to God for their safe 
arrival." 

The preparations for the Spanish Armada and 
its coming in the next year prevented the possi- 
bility of another Arctic voyage, and Davis was 
called to take his part in the great naval struggle. 
In 1 59 1 we find him again engaged in his search 
for the North-West Passage, but this time by 
another route. 

He sailed with Cavendish, who had followed 
on Drake's track round the world in 1587, to the 
Straits of Magellan. But here Cavendish deserted 
him, and ultimately died on his way home, and 
Davis did not carry out his intention of exploring 
the " back parts " of America on his way to the 
Arctic Regions. 

For some years he stayed at home and wrote 
his naval works entitled the "Seaman's Secrets" 
and the " World's Hydrographical Description," 
in which he tried to help future seamen by 
hints and suggestions drawn from his own ex- 
periences. 



£90 IN SHAKSPERE'S ENGLAND 

In 1598 he went as chief pilot on a Dutch 
expedition tp the East Indies, but he sailed North 
no more. 

He had the misfortune, like Raleigh, to outlive 
the great Queen who knew how to value servants 
such as he. 

He sailed as pilot in the East India Company 
just started, and then left the Company to act as 
pilot to The Tiger, on a private expedition to the 
East Indies, sent out in 1604 to trade with China 
and Japan. The head of the expedition was Sir 
Edward Michaelham, and King James had granted 
him a licence to trade with these countries. It was 
on board The Tiger that the great explorer met his 
death. 

On the Pahang coast they fell in with a 
party of Japanese, who first disarmed them by 
appearing friendly, and then rose suddenly in- 
tending to seize the English ship for their own 
use. 

The end came in a moment. Davis was seized 
when coming out of the gun-room by the treacher- 
ous Japanese, and fell to the ground mortally 
wounded. 

And in that Eastern Sea, under the blue waters 
that he had loved so well, the body of John Davis 
was laid to rest : the gentlest, wisest, and most 



ELIZABETHAN SEAMEN 191 

persevering of the mighty brotherhood to which 
he belonged. 

And at that sea-funeral surely would be heard — 

" The far bell ringing 

At the setting of the sun, 
And a phantom voice is singing 
Of the great days done. 
There's a far bell ringing, 
And a phantom voice is singing 
Of renown for ever clinging 
To the great days done." 



CHAPTER X 

THE ARMADA I LORD HOWARD AND ESSEX 

No picture of English life during the time of 
Shakspere would be complete without showing the 
narrow strip of sea which Sir Thomas Gresham 
crossed on his business journeys forty times in one 
year, crowded as it was for those few summer 
weeks in 1588 with the knighthood of England 
and of Spain. 

The ever growing hatred between the Spaniards 
and English could no longer be restrained. Mary, 
Queen of Scots, in Catholic eyes the rightful heir 
to the throne of England, had met her tragic fate 
the year before, and had closed the life, in which 
she had met with little but trouble and disappoint- 
ment, with a lofty resignation worthy of her noble 
Stuart race ; now Philip of Spain, the most ardently 
Catholic among the Princes of Europe, had made 
ready, with help from all sides, to invade England, 
depose the heretic and blood - stained Queen 
who now reigned there, and re-establish the old 
religion throughout the country. Such was the 



THE ARMADA 193 

Spanish intention, and the preparations for its 
successful carrying out were gigantic. 

There were 132 ships, bringing, besides sailors, 
priests, and galley-slaves, soldiers to the number 
of over 21,000, and stocked with provisions to 
last for six months during the projected con- 
quest of England. Such was the Armada, which 
contained the bravest sons of every Spanish 
house, and refugees from many noble families 
of other nations, and it was to be met in the 
Channel by the Duke of Parma, with an addi- 
tional Spanish army from the Netherlands of 
17,000 men. 

Elizabeth's navy only numbered thirty-four 
vessels, but from every seaport town private ships 
came forth ready to serve against the national 
enemy. Drake and Hawkins had vessels of their 
own, and Drake's privateers were in good fighting 
condition ; Lord Howard had two ships which he 
manned, and of the great ports London alone pro- 
vided thirty, furnished and equipped by the chief 
merchants of the city. 

And men and money poured in on all sides 
for the service of Queen and country. From 
town and village, from castle, manor-house, and 
cottage, from Yorkshire Moors and Devonshire 
Fells, and from the pleasant hills of Kent poured 

N 



194 IN SHAKSPERE'S ENGLAND 

forth the best of England's sons, of every age and 
class, united in one bond of loyalty to England, 
and of hatred to England's enemy. 

A gallant band the seamen must have made, as 
each passed in turn to take the command of his 
ship, whose helm he had guided through many a 
troubled sea in frozen Arctic region or under 
burning tropical skies, but which had never 
had so great a need of cool head and steady 
hand as she would have now when facing her 
deadly foe in the narrow waters of the English 
Channel. 

Hawkins was Rear-Admiral ; he was also 
Treasurer of the Navy, and it was owing to his 
care that the ships were all sent out of dock in 
first-rate condition. Drake was Vice-Admiral, with 
his little fleet of devoted privateers ready to follow 
him to death in any form ; Raleigh, Essex, and 
Frobisher were there too, all eager for honour 
and for revenge. 

The story of the Armada and its fate hardly 
needs re-telling, it has been so often told that it 
is familiar to all. Lord Howard, who com- 
manded the fleet, was an able man, patient 
and painstaking, who knew well the worth of 
his subordinates ; the land army, gathered at 
Tilbury, was under the leadership of the Queen's 



THE ARMADA 195 

old favourite Leicester, who died a few months 
after the scattering of the Armada. 

The greatest trial to the English ships, which 
were quite inadequately provided both with food 
and ammunition, was the time of waiting while 
they lay in the Channel expecting the foe. 

Even when the start from Cadiz was made, the 
weather was so violent that it took the Spaniards 
three weeks to reach the Cape of Finisterre. 
The weather had been bad all through the 
spring, and seemed no better with the advance 
of summer. 

But the day was fair and mild when at last the 
great galleons were seen entering the Channel, 
and news of their coming was brought to the 
English ships lying in Plymouth harbour. 

Drake let the heavy Spanish fleet sail by, and 
then pursued them ; and by their quick move- 
ments the English vessels were able to get near 
enough to pour discharges from their guns into 
the great broadsides of the larger ships, and then 
to turn and move quickly out of range. The 
Spaniards were prepared for hand-to-hand war- 
fare, their decks were crowded with the soldiers 
who were to complete, on landing, the conquest 
of England, but they were poor marksmen, and 
their vessels were slow and lumbering, so that 



196 IN SHAKSPERE'S ENGLAND 

the English method of harassing them on their 
way up the Channel found their weak spot at 
once. 

And so the two fleets went on their way, with 
the eyes of Europe bent upon them, until the 
Spaniards anchored for rest in Calais Roads. 

Some of their vessels had been taken, some 
had put into French ports for safety, and the 
English were busy in replenishing their scanty 
stores of food and ammunition from the prizes 
they had taken from their foes. 

The Duke of Medina Sidonia, the Spanish 
commander, sent an urgent appeal for help to 
the Duke of Parma, who doubtless had antici- 
pated a very different message on the arrival of 
the Invincible Armada. Meanwhile, in the cabin 
of Lord Howard's ship a council was being held 
as to the next step to be taken, and the result 
was the sending into the darkness, amid the 
sleeping Spanish vessels, eight blazing fire-ships, 
filled with pitch and powder. 

Wearied and dispirited as they were, the 
Spaniards lost all power of organisation, and 
did just what Howard had anticipated, leaving 
their sheltered moorings, and putting out in haste 
into the open sea. 

The English followed them along the Flemish 



THE ARMADA 197 

coast, and on July 29th the fierce sea-fight off 
Gravelines took place. From nine o'clock in the 
morning until six at night it lasted, and through- 
out the whole engagement the English had the 
advantage. " Great was the spoil and harm that 
was done to them," wrote one of the English 
captains. " When I was furthest off, I was not 
out of the shot of their arquebuses, and most 
times within speech one of another. Every man 
did well, and when every one was weary and 
our cartridges spent, we ceased and followed the 
enemy, who bore away in very good order." 

The "good order" endured but for a short 
time ; the victory of the English was complete, 
and after watching the defeated galleons for a 
time, Howard and Drake put back to England 
to tell their tale of glory ; while for weeks more 
was dragged out on the coasts of the British 
Isles that saddest of naval dramas, the end of all 
but fifty-three of the gallant Spanish vessels. 

Sidonia decided that it was useless to try to 
brave again the terrors of the Channel, and that 
the return to Spain must be made by way of 
the Orkneys and the west coast of Ireland. 

And the voyage was one long-drawn tale of 
disaster and destruction. We cannot dwell upon 
it here ; the wrecked mariners begging for water 



198 IN SHAKSPERE'S ENGLAND 

in return for casks of rich Spanish wine, and 
being driven back dying of thirst by the wild 
Irish peasants ; the death of young Fitzmaurice, 
and his burial in a carved cedar chest beneath 
the waters of Blacksod Bay ; the passionate 
prayer for life of the members of Sidonia's house- 
hold who were thrown on shore at Tralee, but 
whose entreaties were unavailing ; and, saddest 
of all, the loss off Dunluce, County Antrim, when 
they thought they were well on their homeward 
way, of the ship under Alonzo da Leveya, to 
whose care the sons of the great Spanish houses 
had been entrusted. 



" Weep, wide brown eyes, along the Spanish shore, 
Your dark-haired lovers shall return no more.'' 



It was a great day for England ; the hour of 
trial had come to her sons, and none had failed 
in their duty ; soldiers, seamen, merchants alike 
had done their part ; by private energy, by 
patience and endurance on the part of the badly- 
fed crews, by gallant generalship, and unsparing 
thought on the part of the leaders, the terrible 
national calamity had been avoided ; but it must 
not be forgotten that the elements from the 
first fought for England, and to the last they 
fought against Spain. Even in the glow of 



THE ARMADA 199 

triumph the memory of that summer of 1588 
must always bring to English hearts, let us look 
with pity at those relics still to be seen on the 
wild west coast of Ireland, cannon, figure-heads, 
one imbedded wreck, and saddest of all, the 
whitened bones that strew the coast for mile upon 
mile in Donegal on the sand-hills of Loughros 
More. 

The misfortunes of the Spanish fleet were no 
doubt aggravated by the want of ability on the 
part of their commander, the young Duke of 
Medina Sidonia ; while Elizabeth, as usual, had 
made a wise choice in setting Lord Howard of 
Effingham over her naval forces. Lord Howard 
was of noble birth, first cousin once removed to 
Elizabeth herself, and he had been trained from 
his youth in naval matters by his father, the first 
Lord Howard of Effingham, who commanded the 
fleet under Queen Mary. 

Both father and son were Catholics during 
Mary's reign, but both probably conformed to 
the New Religion on the accession of Elizabeth, 
and the son was one of the Queen's most faithful 
and most trusted servants all through her life, 
and was one of those who stood beside her death- 
bed. 

He was a handsome man, tall and commanding 



200 IN SHAKSPERE'S ENGLAND 

in presence and courteous in manner ; he was less 
daring, and more cautious and self-restrained 
than most seamen of his time, and this was 
probably the reason why Elizabeth trusted him 
so fully ; for much as she encouraged her bold 
adventurers, in political affairs she appreciated 
caution above all else. Lord Howard was twice 
married ; his second wife, Margaret Stuart, was 
the daughter of the Earl of Murray ; his first wife, 
Catherine, was an intimate friend of Elizabeth's, 
and is the heroine of the unauthenticated tale of 
Essex and the ring. She died one month before 
her royal mistress. 

Lord Howard during the fight with the Armada 
had been on the Ark, a ship of 800 tons which 
had been built by Raleigh, and sold to the Queen ; 
he did not seem to realise how complete his victory 
had been, for after the fight off Gravelines he 
wrote to Walsingham, Elizabeth's secretary : " We 
have chased them in fight until this evening late, and 
distressed them much ; but their fleet consisteth 
of mighty ships and great strength. . . . Their 
force is wonderful great and strong, and yet we 
pluck their feathers by little and little." 

Howard was the leader in the last great blow 
which Elizabeth struck against the power of the 
King of Spain. It took years to repair the ravages 



LORD HOWARD 201 

of the Armada, but in 1596 another well-manned 
flee* was gathered in Cadiz harbour, and though 
Drake himself had just sailed on his last voyage, 
his words in 1587 as to "singeing the Spanish 
King's beard " must have been in the ears of 
those who planned the destruction of this second 
Spanish fleet. 

An expedition was fitted out, and sent from 
England, under the joint command of Lord 
Howard and the Earl of Essex, the one to be 
supreme at sea, the other on land. Raleigh, too, 
was with them, eager to avenge the recent death 
of his cousin. Sir Richard Grenville ; and, after 
fierce fighting, the Spanish ships were beaten 
and destroyed, and the town itself burned and 
plundered. 

The vanity of Essex led to disagreements be- 
tween him and Howard, which were further aggra- 
vated by the Queen rewarding Howard for his 
good service against Spain by creating him Earl 
of Nottingham. She further distinguished him 
by bestowing upon him the office, which was to 
have been Leicester's, of Lord-Lieutenant of all 
England ; and his duty it was to watch the 
Spanish powers, and to see that none of the 
threatened invasions from the Netherlands found 
England unprepared. 



202 IN SHAKSPERE'S ENGLAND 

Essex's fall must have been embittered by 
the fact that Lord Howard, his old naval rival, 
was one of the commissioners chosen to try his 
cause. 

In 1603, Elizabeth honoured Howard by pay- 
ing him a visit at Arundel House, where he enter- 
tained her for some days. The feasting on this 
occasion, we are told, was " nothing extraordinary, 
neither were his presents so precious as was ex- 
pected, being only a whole suit of apparel, whereas 
it was thought he would have bestowed his rich 
hangings of all the fights with the Armada in 
1588." 

But Howard was a wise man, as well as a 
courtier, and he had a good memory ; no doubt 
he thought that a " whole suit of apparel " — 
especially such apparel as Elizabeth wore — was 
quite enough to bestow upon a Queen who had 
allowed his private purse to be drained almost to 
its last penny to provide food and powder while 
fighting against the Armada, and who had refused 
him money for the help of the fever-stricken 
victims when the battle was over, and left him un- 
aided to erect rough sheds and out-houses, so that 
the heroic sailors who had given their lives for 
England might have some fitter place in which 
to die than the open streets of Margate. 



LORD HOWARD 203 

Howard knew Elizabeth well, and he kept her 
confidence to the end. It was he who prevailed 
on her to be carried to her bed, after those weary 
hours when death was summoning her, and she 
lay upon cushions trying to resist the call, and 
it was to his sign that the dying Queen re- 
luctantly assented in naming James of Scotland 
her successor. 

Howard outlived the Queen by more than 
twenty years, and still served as Lord Admiral 
under James until 1619, when he was pensioned, 
and honourably relieved of the office. 

He died at Harling, near Croydon, in December 
1624, at the age of eighty-four, and was buried 
in the family vault at Reigate ; and a monument 
to his memory still stands in the church of St. 
Margaret's, at Westminster. 

There is no greater contrast to be found in 
the reign of Elizabeth, than that between the 
characters of the two men she sent in com- 
mand of the force to Cadiz in 1596, Lord 
Howard of Effingham, and Robert Devereux, 
Earl of Essex. 

After the death of Leicester, the chief place in 
the Queen's affections was given to the handsome, 
bold, accomplished young nobleman, the step- 
son of her late favourite. Essex was the great- 



204 IN SHAKSPERE'S ENGLAND 

grandson of Anne Boleyn's sister, and so was 
nearly related to Elizabeth herself ; she loved him 
for his beauty, grace, and daring, but the same 
blood ran in their veins, and made the Earl's 
haughty spirit little fitted to bear the despotic 
treatment to vi^hich Elizabeth's favourites were all 
in turn subjected. 

In his early years at Court the Queen treated 
him as a spoiled young cousin ; she listened to the 
sonnets he composed in her honour, she talked 
familiarly with him on the scholarly subjects in 
which they were both interested, and she made him 
her constant companion in spite of their difference 
in age. She created him Master of the Horse 
when he was barely twenty, on his return from 
the Netherlands, whither he had accompanied 
his stepfather, the Earl of Leicester, and where 
he had distinguished himself in the battle of 
Zutphen. 

Essex shared in the glory of the defeat of the 
Armada, and before its arrival he was given the 
coveted Order of the Garter, and made a General 
of Horse. 

Perhaps for such a nature as his success came 
too soon : he was beloved by the Queen, and 
was devotedly followed by a large number of 
friends, and the common people had the feeling 




Walker &^ Cockcrell 

Robert Devereux, vSecond Earl of Essex 



ESSEX 205 

of admiration for him that such a nature as 
his — brave, generous, and impulsive — always 
inspires. 

Of reverence for his elders and betters he had 
little, nor did his early success tend to increase 
what he had. The prudent policy of the Cecils 
was not to his taste, and in matters political, as 
in all other affairs, he never hesitated to express 
his views with more energy than prudence or 
politeness. 

His father, Walter Devereux, Earl of Essex, 
had led a gallant but miserable little expedition in 
earlier days, to try to occupy the country round 
Belfast ; his experiences had not been such as to 
encourage the undertaking, but they were reason 
enough to make his son consider himself an 
authority on Irish affairs. 

The first serious offence Essex committed 
against the Queen was his contempt of her ap- 
pointment of Sir William Knollys to superintend 
Irish affairs in 1598. Essex had recommended 
Carew, and when he found his wishes disregarded, 
he contemptuously shrugged his shoulders, and 
turned his back on the Queen in her own council 
chamber. 

Such conduct, especially in public, was met by 
Elizabeth with the summary justice, and some- 



2o6 IN SHAKSPERE'S ENGLAND 

what scant manners, of the times. She boxed her 
favourite's ears soundly, and told him "to go 
and be hanged ! " And he, equally angry, clapped 
his hand on his sword, and flung himself out of 
the chamber, swearing with a great oath that he 
would not have borne so gross an insult from 
Henry VIII. himself! 

From that day there never seemed the same 
feeling between the haughty Queen and her no 
less haughty cousin, though a reluctant apology 
was wrung from Essex, and he was restored to 
Court favour again after a time. 

In 1599 he prevailed on Elizabeth to send him 
as Lord-Lieutenant to Ireland, to try to stamp 
out the rebellion there, which was being largely 
aided from Spain. But brave as he was, Essex 
was neither a general nor a statesman, and far 
abler men than he have failed in the attempt to 
bring order out of the chaos of Irish politics. 
He effected nothing, but wasted his men, and 
more money than the thrifty Queen generally 
allowed her generals the chance of expending. 
He finally made peace, on his own account, with 
Hugh O'Neill, the Earl of Tyrone, the Irish leader ; 
and then, although expressly ordered by the Queen 
to remain at his post according to her pleasure, 
he hastened back to England to justify himself 



ESSEX 207 

personally, before his enemies had time to mis- 
represent his conduct. 

The Queen, so careful to be only seen when 
royally arrayed, had but just risen from her bed, 
and was being tended by her maid in those 
intricacies of the toilet which must have been 
elaborate indeed to produce a semblance of youth- 
ful beauty in the nearly seventy years old lady. 
In rushed Essex, and flung himself on his knees 
at her feet, praying for her pardon. Her love for 
him made her receive him kindly at the moment, 
but after his dismissal the more she thought over 
the matter the more she felt the insult of his 
behaviour. 

He was kept a prisoner, and when at length 
liberated, and allowed to go to his home at 
Ewelme in Oxfordshire, he was made to realise 
that his favour at Court was over. 

Proud, vain, and ambitious, this was the punish- 
ment he could least bear ; his good and bad 
feelings alike resented the idea of being shut out 
from Court life, and kept in the background like 
a child in disgrace. 

Elizabeth loved to show her power over her 
favourites, but in Essex she found one whose 
spirit was as haughty as her own, and who could 
brook insult as little as herself. 



2o8 IN SHAKSPERE'S ENGLAND 

He was deeply in debt: his income depended 
largely on a monopoly of sweet wines which the 
Queen had granted him in earlier days ; the 
patent for this expired while he was in retirement, 
it was not renewed to him, but was given else- 
where. 

This was the last straw, he could bear no more. 
He hastened up to London, and filled Essex 
House, on the banks of the Thames, with his 
friends, and a strong body of armed retainers, and 
when the Lord Chief Justice visited him to ask the 
meaning of such warlike preparations, he caused 
him and his companions to be detained for some 
hours in the house under a guard. 

Essex was no statesman, and the whole affair 
was conducted like the mad escapade of an angry 
boy. But it was too serious to be judged as such. 

He and his friends marched through London, 
endeavouring to rouse the populace, whom he 
fancied devoted to his person. His object was to 
seize the Queen, and so gain by force the inter- 
view she had denied him. But they found the 
streets prepared against him. Westminster and 
Charing Cross were barricaded, and Whitehall 
guarded by troops ; so they had to return by boat 
to Essex House. 

Here he and his adherents shut themselves up, 



ESSEX 209 

and declared their intention of only yielding with 
their lives. 

The troops of the Lord Admiral surrounded 
the house, and it was only owing to the presence 
of Essex's wife and Lady Rich (Sidney's Stella), 
within the walls, that it was not burned to the 
ground. 

However, even the angry Earl could not at- 
tempt to stand a siege, and he surrendered before 
nightfall, the Queen sending word that she would 
not sleep until Essex House was taken. 

Then came the Earl's second and real imprison- 
ment, and his trial in which Bacon bore so pro- 
minent a part. 

The judgment pronounced both Essex and 
Southampton guilty of treason, but only one was 
reprieved. It was a struggle for Elizabeth to 
bring herself to sign the death-warrant of her 
favourite, but she felt his conduct was indefensible, 
and that if he were pardoned no offender need 
expect condemnation. 

Late in the evening of Tuesday, February 24th, 
1 60 1, the Constable of the Tower, Lord Thomas 
Howard, opened the gates to receive the warrant 
which condemned the Earl to die on the scaffold 
the next morning. 

He had begged the Queen to let his execution 

O 



2TO IN SHAKSPERE'S ENGLAND 

be private, and she had not denied him this last 
boon. 

Early in the morning he came forth from his 
prison, accompanied by the two divines the Queen 
had sent to care for his soul, and together they 
mounted the black-hung scaffold, the Earl clad in 
black from head to foot. 

Seated on forms, to watch the end, were about a 
hundred lords, and Essex entreated their prayers, 
"for me, the most wretched creature upon earth." 

He acknowledged the justice of his condemna- 
tion, he prayed for the long life and prosperity of 
the Queen, and then, led to the block by his chap- 
lain, he cried out, " O God, give me true humility 
and patience to endure to the end ! " And to the 
waiting noblemen, now mostly weeping in silent 
sympathy, he said, " Pray with me and for me 
that ... it may please the everlasting God to 
send down His angels to carry my soul before 
His mercy-seat. . . ." 

The blow fell : then came silence, only broken 
by the solemn words of the headsman, " God save 
the Queen." 



CHAPTER XI 

LORD BURGHLEY, ROBERT CECIL, AND 
SIR FRANCIS WALSINGHAM 

From the stirring deeds on sea and land of such 
men as Raleigh, Drake, Sidney, and Essex, let us 
turn now to that quiet council chamber where for 
nearly half a century the great Lord Burghley did 
his part in building up the England of to-day 
from the chaos in which he found it. His family 
both before his time, and until our own day, have 
been politicians, and it was to his unwearied toil, 
his clear head and sound judgment, that more than 
all besides Elizabeth's reign owed its greatness. 

Weak in health, cool and quiet in manner, 
self-controlled where most men were violent 
forgiving where others sought revenge, he forms 
a striking contrast to the figures among whom 
he moved. 

His character appealed to one side of Elizabeth's 
nature, and she trusted him as she trusted no one 
else on earth. 

William Cecil was born in 1520, at Bourn, in 



212 IN SHAKSPERE'S ENGLAND 

Lincolnshire, where his family had lived for three 
generations. His father had been Master of the 
Robes to Henry VHL, and the son's rise into 
courtly favour is said to have begun in the follow- 
ing unconventional manner. In the year 1542, 
after his education at St. John's College, Cam- 
bridge, had been completed, and he was studying 
at Gray's Inn, he met in the presence chamber 
two chaplains of the Irish chief O'Neill, who was 
then on a visit to the King. " And talking long with 
them in Lattin," as the chronicler says, " he fell in 
disputation with the priests, wherein he showed so 
great learning and witt, as he proved the poore 
priests to have neither, who weare so putt down as 
they had not a word to sale, but flung away no 
less discontented than ashamed to be foiled in 
such a place by so younge a berdless yewth." 
This worsting of the priests so pleased the King, 
that he sent for young Cecil to his presence, and 
directed his father to seek out some post to be 
bestowed upon him. And the reversion of the 
custos brievium in the Court of Common Pleas, 
which was the post selected, was the first of many 
official appointments held by William Cecil. 

From his earliest years Cecil was unlike the other 
great men of his time : his strong points were 
those most wanting in such men as Raleigh and 




Lord Burghley 



BURGHLEY— CECIL— WALSINGHAAl 213 

Drake, and he lacked much of what gave them 
their briUiancy. 

Cool-headed, industrious, far-seeing, and tem- 
perate, he pulled the wires which worked the 
figures on the political stage, and yet he had 
none of the attractiveness about him which those 
figures possessed to so high a degree. 

Throughout the reign of Edward VI. he had 
held office, and during the time of Mary he had 
kept diplomatically in the background, but with 
the accession of Elizabeth his real power began. 

He had given her wise advice in her un- 
sheltered girlhood ; he had been in secret com- 
munication with her in the months previous to 
her sister's death, and had drawn up a proclama- 
tion for her accession ; he was the first member 
of her Privy Council to be sworn ; and through 
good report and evil, through dark days and 
dangers, he was her faithful servant to the day 
of his death. 

His was not a heroic character, he was wary, 
cautious, and compromising ; his methods were 
not always straightforward, but they were those 
of his age, and through all his aims were lofty, 
his views were wise, and his judgment just. To 
the Queen, it has been said, " His calm and de- 
liberate wisdom seemed to be the expression of 



214 IN SHAKSPERE'S ENGLAND 

her own higher self. She treated him often as 
men treat their conscience when it reminds them 
of unpleasant truths. She browbeat him, and 
abused him, and contradicted him ; she over- 
whelmed him with reproaches, so that he often 
left her presence in tears. But she always 
thought over his advice, and often, after a 
struggle, allowed it to prevail over her own in- 
clinations." To him she showed the sterner side 
of her nature ; on him she did not shower 
honours and lands, as upon such courtly favour- 
ites as Leicester and Essex ; she did not choose 
him as her companion in the pageants and scenes 
of splendour which she loved, but with him she 
faced the life and death problems of European 
politics ; to him she gave up occasionally that 
will she yielded to no other man, and he pro- 
bably understood her better than any man has 
ever done. "This judgment," she said to him, 
" I have of you : that you will not be corrupted 
with any gift, and that you will be faithful to 
the state ; and that, without respect of my private 
will, you will give me that counsel that you think 
best." 

She made him Secretary of State on her ac- 
cession, and in 1571 created him Lord Burghley, 
whereby he became, according to himself, <'the 



BURGHLEY— CECIL— WALSINGHAM 215 

poorest lord in England." In 1572 he was made 
Lord Treasurer, so that he held the post of chief 
minister from the death of Queen Mary, in 1558, 
until his own death forty years later. 

Although like many others Cecil had con- 
formed to the Catholic religion during the last 
reign, he was a strong Protestant, and his policy 
was to establish the Protestant power in Europe, 
and, at the same time, to weaken the power of 
France. He saw the danger that had always 
threatened England in the union of France with 
Scotland, and his endeavour was always to keep 
those countries from such a union as might 
undermine the power of England. By favouring 
Spain he could weaken France, and not even 
the fact of Huguenot Henri IV. succeeding to 
the French throne altered his attitude of distrust 
to the French as allies of England. In the first 
year of Elizabeth's reign, he wrote, " France, being 
an ancient enemy of England, seeketh always to 
make Scotland an instrument to exercise thereby 
their malice upon England, and to make a foot- 
stool thereof to look over England as they may." 
And forty years later, shortly before his death, 
the French ambassador spoke of him as still 
leading " all the old councillors of the Queen 
who have true English hearts ; that is to say, 



2i6 IN SHAKSPERE'S ENGLAND 

who are enemies of the welfare and repose of 
France." His great desire was always to work 
out his policy by diplomacy, not by bloodshed ; 
he was unlike the men of his time in his hatred 
of war, one of his favourite maxims being " that 
war is the curse, and peace the blessing of God 
upon a nation ; " and another, " that a realme 
gaineth more by one year's peace than by ten 
years' war." 

The weary struggle with France, into which 
Philip had dragged England, was brought to an 
end as soon as Cecil had the power, and that 
without openly offending Philip in spite of the 
Spanish ambassador Feria calling Cecil "a pesti- 
lent knave." Language, at that time, was apt to 
be highly coloured, Elizabeth herself on the one 
occasion when she flew into a passion with Cecil 
rating him " as a froward old fool." 

But though he may have wept at her displeasure, 
it did not lead him to alter his course, and through, 
all the difficulties of the various foreign marriages 
the Queen proposed for herself, Cecil kept a clear 
head, and aided Elizabeth in allowing each matri- 
monial affair to go as far and no farther than was 
necessary for political purposes. 

He and Sir Francis Walsingham worked to- 
gether in the elaborate system they instituted for 



BURGHLEY— CECIL— WALSINGHAM 217 

gaining and keeping knowledge of political and 
private matters abroad, and no crisis of events 
ever seemed to create confusion in Cecil's shrewd 
brain. 

But the vacillating conduct of the Queen made 
his task a hard one, and it needed all the chief 
minister's unwearied patience, unflagging energy, 
and never-failing foresight to establish in England 
religious freedom, commercial prosperity, and the 
peace he loved : and to him more than to any 
other single man that peace was due. His ways 
may have been crooked when compared with 
those of our own statesmen, but he belonged to 
a time when devious roads were necessary, and 
his moral standard was that of his age. His 
aims were lofty, and his devotion to England was 
heart-whole, and in the service of England and 
of Elizabeth he spent every faculty of mind and 
body. 

His health had never been good, and the gout 
from which he suffered was a constant source of 
trouble to him, nor was it likely to be alleviated by 
such remedies as were pressed upon him, amongst 
others, medicated slippers, a tincture of gold, and 
the " oyle of stagg's blood." 

His delicacy intensified his aversion to all the 
out-door sports of the time, and it helped to make 



2i8 IN SHAKSPERE'S ENGLAND 

reading his only relaxation. He was fond of his 
beautiful gardens at Theobalds, his country home 
near London, and would ride about among his 
beds and shrubberies on a little mule, when he 
allowed himself an hour of refreshment in the 
open air. 

His home life was peaceful and happy : he was 
twice married, but his first wife, Mary Cheke, the 
sister of his Cambridge friend, the great scholar, 
Sir John Cheke, only survived their marriage a 
few years. His second wife was the eldest of the 
highly-educated daughters of Sir Anthony Cooke, 
and must have been a companion well fitted to 
his grave and serious nature. She died before 
him, and his grief at her loss rendered his nature 
even more gloomy than before. But he seemed 
to keep up friendly relations with the family of his 
first wife throughout his life, as in the will of Mrs. 
Cheke, who being in straitened circumstances after 
the death of her husband, had kept a wine-shop at 
Cambridge, we find she left to her eldest daughter 
all her " wine-potts," with her " second feather 
bed," but her " new bed, with the bolsters and 
hangings," to her grandson, "Thomas Sysell," to 
be kept in trust by his executors until such time 
as he " shall come to school at Cambridge." 

Although caring little for luxury in itself, Cecil 



BURGHLEY— CECIL— WALSINGHAM 219 

always kept up great state in his household 
arrangements ; he was very wealthy, having in- 
herited lands from his father, and made much 
money in the course of his long and honourable 
career. We are told that " he kept open house 
everywhere, and his steward kept a standing table 
for gentlemen, besides two other long tables, often 
twice set out, one for the clerk of the kitchen, and 
the other for yeomen." 

Young men of noble family were placed in his 
household in great numbers, and his influence 
was courted on all sides and by all classes ; but, 
in spite of this, he seemed to have kept himself 
free from the bribery of the times. He outlived 
all those who had *' started with him in the race 
for power and fame," and who had once been his 
rivals, Ascham, Cheke, Nicholas Bacon, Leicester, 
and Walsingham, all went before him. The war 
party, to which he was so bitterly opposed in 
the last years of his life, was led by Essex, the 
popular idol, but a man utterly devoid of statesman- 
like qualities. Cecil had striven for forty years to 
keep England at peace with Spain, and strong was 
his opposition to the younger and more warlike 
party. 

It almost seemed as if the gift of prophecy were 
bestowed on the aged minister, when he answered 



220 IN SHAKSPERE'S ENGLAND 

an impetuous speech of Essex in council, by draw- 
ing from his pocket a worn prayer-book, and 
silently pointing to the words, " Bloodthirsty and 
deceitful men shall not live out half their days." 
Verily, a prophecy soon to be fulfilled ! 

Though worn with illness, and racked with pain, 
Burghley continued to discharge his duties to the 
state until a few weeks before his death. 

He wrote out full instructions for his younger 
son, Robert Cecil, with whom for the last years 
his work had been shared, and then, in the end 
of July 1598, he lay down on the bed in Cecil 
House, from which he was not to rise again. It 
was a fitting deathbed for him ; there in 

" Streaming London's central roar, 
With the sound of those he wrought for," 

in his ears to the end, he prepared to give up his 
earthly stewardship, with the same calm dignity 
with which he had held it for nearly half a 
century. 

" The Lord be praised," he said, " the time is 
come." 

His children and his friends stood around him, 
and he blessed them, and bade them farewell, 
commanding his children "to love and fear God, 
and love one another." 

At the last he prayed for the Queen, in whose 



BURGHLEY— CECIL— WALSINGHAM 221 

service his life had been spent, and then as a new 
day began to break, he entered into the rest he 
had never known on earth. 

By his death his son Robert Cecil was left in a 
peculiarly isolated position. He was at the head 
of a small and unpopular party, even his cousins, 
Anthony and Francis Bacon, siding with Essex, 
and public feeling being all against the views he 
had inherited from his father. 

The Queen was filled with grief at the loss of her 
faithful minister, and even men who had troubled 
him and disputed with him during his life felt 
that there was no one to take his place. His 
bitterest opponent Essex, at the magnificent public 
funeral in Westminster Abbey, we are told, " did 
more than ceremoniously show sorrow ; " though 
there is a touch of irony in the account by 
another eye-witness of the number of mourners, 
among whom was the Earl of Essex, "who 
(whether it were upon consideration of the 
present occasion or for his own disfavours) carried 
the heavest countenance of the company." 

Between Lord Burghley and his younger son 
there seems to have been a more than ordinary 
bond of affection and sympathy. Thomas, the 
Lord Treasurer's son by his first wife Mary Cheke, 
inherited his title and much of his property, but 



222 IN SHAKSPERE'S ENGLAND 

Robert, the son of his second wife, Mildred Cooke, 
seemed always a far more congenial companion to 
him, and on his training the father spent infinite 
care and pains. 

As a boy Robert was delicate, and he was edu- 
cated at home, but as a youth he was sent abroad 
to learn modern languages, and while in Paris he 
used to write letters to his father which Burghley 
sent back to him with grammatical corrections. 

He was smaller in stature than his father had 
been, and like him slender and unathletic, and be- 
sides this he suffered from a slight curvature of 
the spine, which made his figure crooked, and 
about which he was always sensitive. According 
to the rough manners of the time, Elizabeth used 
to speak of him as her " little elf," and later on 
King James called him his " pigmy." He had been 
knighted by the Queen on one of her visits to his 
father's place, Theobolds, where he had prepared 
an address, to be delivered to her by a supposed 
hermit, which brimmed over with flattery, ex- 
aggerated even for that time. It was filled, too, 
with strong hints as to the desire of the hermit's 
friend, i.e. Burghley, for rest from public ser- 
vice, and the hope that the friend or " founder's " 
son may be chosen to fill his place. " Hearing," 
says the hermit, " of all the country folks I meet, 



BURGHLEY— CECIL— WALSINGHAM 223 

that your Majesty doth use him in your service, 
as in former time you have done his father, 
my founder, and that though his experience 
and judgment be not comparable, yet as report 
goeth, he hath something in him hke the child of 
such a parent," the hermit goes on to beg the all- 
powerful Queen to advance Robert Cecil in active 
public life. 

In 1596, while Essex, his chief opponent, was 
absent on the expedition to Cadiz, Robert Cecil 
was given the post his father had coveted for him, 
that of Chief Secretary of State, and for the two 
remaining years of Lord Burghley's life most of 
his routine work was done for him by his son. 
They worked in the same careful, cautious 
methods, and though Robert Cecil was an abler 
speaker than his father, quicker and brighter, 
but with far less literary taste and culture, there 
must have been a strong resemblance between 
the two, only that the son, as is so often the 
case, lacked the greatness of the father. To his 
cousin, Francis Bacon, Cecil later on became a 
good friend, though no two men could have been 
more unlike. Bacon writes to him, on one 
occasion, a letter, "empty of matter, but out of 
the fulness of my love," to signify " my continual 
and incessant love for you, thirsting for your 



224 IN SHAKSPERE'S ENGLAND 

return." And again he says, " I write to myself, in 
regard of my love to you, you being as near to me 
in heart's blood as in blood of descent." Cecil more 
than once helped his brilliant but unfortunate 
cousin when he was in debt, and Bacon wrote to 
him that " I cannot forget your Lordship, dum mentor 
ipse met." But such was the depth of Bacon's grati- 
tude, that before Cecil had been dead a week, he 
wrote of him to the King as " no very fit man to 
reduce things to be much better ; for he loved to 
keep the eyes of all Israel a little too much upon 
himself, . . . and, though he had fine passages of 
action, yet the real conclusions came slowly on." 

A true description of the policy of the Cecils ! 
But however " slowly on " their " conclusions " 
came, they were generally those which pointed to 
the safety of England, " and the eyes of all " might 
dwell with advantage on some of the wary methods 
of their statesmanship by which untold political 
evil had often been avoided. 

There was one other quiet figure who worked 
for years by Burghley's side, and shared much of 
his labour, and that was Sir Francis Walsingham, 
whom Robert Cecil succeeded, after an interval 
of six years, in the office of Secretary of State. 
Walsingham was the son of a prominent London 
lawyer, who had made money in his profession, 



BURGHLEY— CECIL— WALSINGHAM 225 

and bought a good deal of land in Kent, includ- 
ing the beautiful old manor of Foot's Cray, near 
Chislehurst, where his son Francis was probably 
born, about the year 1530. 

Francis was educated at King's College, Cam- 
bridge, and entered at Gray's Inn in 1552 ; but, 
being a zealous Protestant, he left England on the 
accession of Mary, and only returned after her 
death. The knowledge of Continental languages 
and affairs which he acquired during those years 
abroad must have been instrumental in giving 
him the unique position he held among English 
statesmen. For with an Englishman's loyalty and 
devotion to the service of Elizabeth, he united an 
aptitude for intrigue and secret diplomacy that 
was hardly to be learned in England alone. He 
soon came under Cecil's notice on account of 
his intelligence in foreign affairs, and in 1570 he 
was sent to Paris as ambassador. There, on the 
24th of August 1572, he had such an experience 
in the massacre of St. Bartholomew as must have 
rooted his Protestant principles more firmly than 
ever. 

His future son-in-law, Philip Sidney, owed his 
life to taking refuge at the English Embassy, which 
had been specially protected by official orders. 

After this terrible ordeal Walsingham sued for 

P 



226 IN SHAKSPERE'S ENGLAND 

recall, and returned to England in April the follow- 
ing year. 

Elizabeth, influenced no doubt by Cecil's high 
opinion of him, recognised from the first his ability 
and his importance as a minister, but she never 
liked or trusted him, and she disregarded his advice 
on every possible occasion, even though she often 
saw its wisdom. 

In December 1573, Walsingham was appointed 
Secretary of State, and held the post until his 
death. 

He and Burghley worked together in their care 
for the interests of Elizabeth and England, Wal- 
singham from his knowledge of Continental matters 
taking the post of Secretary of Foreign Affairs, and 
keeping himself informed of what went on in 
Spain, France, and Italy in a way which has been 
done by no other minister. His methods belonged 
to his own day, and would hardly be considered 
justifiable in ours, even by the exigences of poli- 
tical affairs, but such as they were, he carried them 
out with a perfection of care that left nothing to 
be desired. He had secret agents in his service 
in all countries, through whom he learned much 
that was invaluable to his own and Burghley's 
ministry, both of private and political matters. 
Besides this, his spies were all over England. It 



BURGHLEY— CECIL— WALSINGHAM 227 

was through them that the unhappy Queen of 
Scots met her fate ; and in Spain they were so 
numerous, that before the coming of the Armada, 
Walsingham had been informed of every detail of 
the preparations, the number of men engaged, 
the make of the ships, and even the inventories of 
horses, armour, food, and ammunition. He knew 
well the weapons which the Catholic Spaniards 
and the supporters of Mary Stuart employed 
against England, and little as such weapons were 
to be admired, he made use of them himself against 
those who had first employed them. 

Walsingham was a wise, industrious, and resolute 
politician, and had he been more trusted by Eliza- 
beth, he might have had greater results to show 
for his labours, but his methods of getting infor- 
mation and the " traps " he set to catch his political 
enemies partake too much of the worst features 
of mediaeval Catholic Europe to gain even scant 
admiration from a modern student. 

His favourite maxim was, " Knowledge is never 
too dear," and no words could better express his 
policy. 

He was constantly employed by Elizabeth on 
difficult and dangerous missions, although she 
never liked or trusted him fully. It was he who 
had to conduct in Paris the delicate negotiations 



228 IN SHAKSPERE'S ENGLAND 

for breaking off the proposed marriage between the 
Queen and the Due d'Alen9on, and Walsingham 
was driven nearly to despair by the contradictory 
instructions he received from his royal mistress 
about the matter. To Burghley he wrote at the 
time, " I see her Majesty not disposed to redeem 
her peril otherwise than necessity shall lead her ; 
who is one of the most dangerous pilots that can 
take helm in hand, for where necessity rules, elec- 
tion and consent can take no place." 

And to the Queen herself, in despair at the 
vacillating conduct which seemed to be imperilling 
the safety of England, he ends one of his letters 
with the despairing words, " I conclude, therefore, 
in the heat of duty, that there is no one that serves 
in the place of a councillor that either weighs his 
own credit, or carries that sound affection to your 
Majesty that he ought to do, that would not wish 
himself in the farthest part of Ethiopia rather than 
enjoy the fairest palace in England. The Lord 
God direct your Majesty's heart to take that way 
of counsel that may be most for your honour and 
safety." 

Then, later on, when Alengon had returned to 
England, and the marriage between him and Eliza- 
beth seemed imminent, Walsingham tried praising 
her suitor to her. *' He hath an excellent under- 



BURGHLEY— CECIL— WALSINGHAM 229 

standing," quoth the diplomatic minister, "and 
truly his ugly face is the worst part of him." 
" Then, thou knave," cried the Queen, " why hast 
thou so many times said ill of him ? " And she 
abused the Secretary in words far more appropriate 
to her own conduct than to his, for being " as 
changeable as a weathercock." 

Their intercourse must have been generally of 
a somewhat stormy character, for Walsingham had 
no fear of her passionate nature, and could not be 
awed as Burghley was at times by outbreaks such 
as the Court of Henry VIII. had been wont to 
witness. The Queen visited him occasionally at his 
private house of Barnes, in Surrey, where he lived 
after he sold Foot's Cray manor, but he was always 
too poor to give her the entertainment she loved. 
On the day when she knighted him at Windsor, 
she presented him with gold plate to the value of 
6o| ounces, and in return he gave her a gown of 
blue satin, but such amenities seemed rare between 
them. 

He was a faithful and wise servant to her and 
to England, and she valued his services little as 
she appreciated himself. 

He was so much in want of money that Burghley 
interceded on his behalf for the reversion of some 
of the lands forfeited by Babington and his sup- 



230 IN SHAKSPERE'S ENGLAND 

porters in the plot to release Mary, Queen of Scots, 
but nothing was bestowed on the hard-working 
Secretary, although it was largely owing to him 
that the plot was discovered. 

His only child Frances had married Sir Philip 
Sidney, and it was Walsingham who had to stand 
surety for the payment of his son-in-law's debts 
before the public funeral of the brave young 
knight could take place. 

Walsingham had never been a man of robust 
health, and the want of money and the distrust 
of the Queen embittered and probably shortened 
his Hfe. 

He died in London on the 6th of April 1590, 
and in his will he left orders that he " should be 
buried without any such extraordinary ceremonies 
as usually appertain to a man serving in his place, 
in respect of the greatness of his debts." His 
wishes were carried out, and the funeral took 
place "about 10 of the clock of the next night 
following in Paules Church without solemnity." 

Besides being an able and indefatigable poli- 
tician, Walsingham was a man of great cultivation, 
and of wide sympathies, an ardent patron of 
literature, a correspondent of Richard Grenville 
and Humphrey Gilbert, and an enthusiastic sup- 
porter of the colonising enterprises. He was a 



BURGHLEY—CECIL— WALSINGHAM 231 

consistent and zealous Protestant, and it is to him 
that the wise saying is attributed, so far in advance 
of the religious toleration of the times, that men's 
consciences " are not to be forced but won, and 
seduced by force of truth, and with the aid of 
time, and use of all good means of instruction or 
persuasion." 



CHAPTER XII 

SPENSER 

Edmund Spenser was born at the end of Edward 
VI, 's reign, and was about six years old at the 
time of Elizabeth's accession. He was educated 
at Merchant Taylors' School, under the severe and 
famous headmaster, Dr. Mulcaster, and on the 
2oth of May 1569, he was admitted as a sizar 
to Pembroke Hall, Cambridge. 

There he was partly kept by the kindness of 
Dr. Nowell, the Dean of St. Paul's, who had, 
no doubt, recognised the unusual ability of the 
London schoolboy, and he also received friendly 
notice from Archbishop Grindal, who had suc- 
ceeded Parker at Canterbury. 

Grindal is evidently Spenser's model in his 
"Shepherd's Calendar" for Algrind, the faithful 
Christian pastor who bids the clergy " not live 
ylike as men of the laye." 

Spenser's sympathies, during the years he spent 
at Cambridge, seem to have been stirred by 




Edmund Spenser 



SPENSER 233 

longing for a holier and more consistent life among 
the clergy. 

" The time was once" (he writes), " and may again retorne 
(For ought may happen that hath bene beforne), 
When shepeheards had none inheritaunce, 
Ne of land, nor fee in sufFeraunce, 
But what might arise of the bare shepe 
(Were it more or lesse) which they did keepe. 
Well ywis was it with shepheards thoe : 
Nought having, nought feared they to forgoe ; 
For Pan himselfe was their inheritaunce. 
The shepheards God so wel them guided, 
That of nought they were unprovided." 

He suffered from weak health while at the 
University, but nevertheless he took his degree, 
and left Cambridge, as an M.A., in 1576. 

He made two life-long friendships while at 
Pembroke Hall, one with Edward Kirke, who 
edited his '' Shepherd's Calendar," and the other 
with Gabriel Harvey, to whom he was deeply 
attached throughout his life, and who is re- 
presented as Hobbinoll in the " Shepherd's 
Calendar," while Kirke is Cuddie in the same 
work. 

On leaving Cambridge, Spenser paid a visit to 
the North of England, where he met and loved 
the Rosalind to whose memory he always re- 
mained faithful, even after his marriage, although 
she refused him for love of another. 



234 IN SHAKSPERE'S ENGLAND 

And from the Northern moors he returned 
to the pleasant home county of Kent, and to 
London, where he had been born, and of which 
he wrote : — 

"At length they all to merry London came, 
To fnerry Loftdon, vty tnost kindly ?iurse" 

And describes how he 

" Walkt forth to ease my pain 
Along the shore of silver-streaming Thames." 

In London he had opportunity for cultivating 
the friendship of his hero, Philip Sidney, whose 
noble and chivalrous nature may have well 
formed the model for Spenser's Red Cross 
Knight. The love of the high-souled, beauty- 
loving poet for the stainless knight lasted unim- 
paired until the fatal battle-field of Zutphen, 
and noble were the lines in which Spenser sang 
the virtues and mourned the loss of his dead 
friend : — 

" To praise thy life, or waile thy worthie death. 
And want thy wit, thy wit high, pure, divine, 
Is far beyond the power of mortall line, 
Nor any one hath worth that draweth breath." 

So he wrote of him in his epitaph, and in his 
" Elegie, or Friend's Passion, for his Astrophel, 
written upon the death of the right honourable 



SPENSER 235 

Sir Philip Sidney, Knight," his longing affection 
finds even more beautiful expression : — 

" Was never eie did see that face, 
Was never eare did heare that tong, 
Was never minde did minde his grace, 
That ever thought the travell long ; 
But eies, and eares, and ev'ry thought, 
Were with his sweete perfections caught. 

O God, that such a worthy man, 
In whom so rare desarts did raigne, 
Desired thus, must leave us than. 
And we to wish for him in vaine ! 

O could the stars that bred that wit, 

In force no longer fix^d sit ! " 

It was Sidney who induced Spenser for a time, 
along with Gabriel Harvey and others, to try to 
introduce some of the classical rules into the 
formation of English verse ; but the result of 
this attempt to regulate the poetry of one language 
by rules only applicable to another was not 
successful, and produced a cumbrous and arti- 
ficial style of writing, and poetical genius such 
as Spenser possessed soon threw aside such 
trammels. 

It was a fitting time for a great poet to arise : 
men's minds were filled with mighty deeds at 
home and abroad ; new lands beyond the sea 
were beginning to pour their treasures into 
English homes ; religion was no longer accepted 



236 IN SHAKSPERE'S ENGLAND 

in its hereditary form, but men sought — often 
fiercely and blindly, but still honestly — to come 
nearer to the truth ; there was peace in the 
land, and the once blood-stained throne of Henry 
VIII. and Mary was filled by her whom men 
loved to call the Virgin Queen, and whose very 
maidenhood rendered her a fit subject for a 
poet's lay. 

In 1579 Spenser's "Shepherd's Calendar " was 
entered at Stationers' Hall, and unlike many 
others of our great writers, he gained for himself 
at once by its publication universal recognition 
as the "new poet" of the day. 

According to the fashion of the time it was a 
pastoral, and his characters were shepherds, 
with homely English names such as Willye, 
Piers, and Colin Clout, the last representing 
himself. 

The poem is not consecutive, but is divided into 
twelve ^glogues, each named after one month of 
the year, and each varying in subject, though the 
same characters constantly recur. 

The stories are delightful, and wonderfully 
modern in their quaint grace and humour ; for 
delicacy of expression and dainty poetical feeling 
there is nothing to compare with them until we 
come to Shakspere's own work. 



SPENSER 237 

The second ^glogue (February), which teaches 
reverence to age, ends with a charming fable 
about a " bragging Briar " (or brere), which 
grew hard by a " goodly Oake " ; the shepherds' 
daughters came to pluck its fair blossoms, and 
the nightingales to sing among its leaves : — 

" And snebbe the good Oake, for he was old, 
Which made this foolish Brere wexe so bold, 
That on a time he cast him to scold." 

And the Oake receives the insults meekly, 
which so inflates with pride the Brere, that it 
complains spitefully to the Husbandman, when 
he passes by, that this faded Oake, 

" Whose bodie is sere, whose braunches broke, 
Whose naked Armes stretch unto the fyre, 
Unto such tyrannic doth aspire ; 
Hindering with his shade my lovely light, 
And robbing me of the swete sonnes sight. 
So beate his old boughes my tender side. 
That oft the bloud springeth from woundes wyde." 

And the Husbandman listens to the tale of the 
bragging Briar, and believes his words ; home 
he hies him, and returns with his " harmefull 
Hatchet " in his hand, and he fells the noble 
Oake, to the ground : — 

" There lyeth the Oake, pitied of none 
Now stands the Brere like a lord alone." 



238 IN SHAKSPERE'S ENGLAND 

But when winter comes, and its blustering 
winds beat upon the now shelterless bush : — 

" Now 'gan he repent his pryde too late ; 
For naked left and disconsolate, 
The byting frost nipt his stalke dead, 
The watrie wette weighed downe his head, 
And heaped snowe burdned him so sore, 
That nowe upright he can stand no more ; 
And, being downe, is trodden in the durt 
Of cattell, and bronzed, and sorely hurt." 

Such is the tale of the Oake and the Briar, and 
equally picturesque is that of the Fox and the Kid, 
which comes at the end of the fifth .^glogue 
(May). 

The subject of faithful and false pastors is 
discussed by two shepherds, Piers and Palinodie. 
The danger of yielding to false teachers is shown 
at the end by Piers in the tale of the Kidde 
who '' was too very foolish and unwise," so 
that when her mother had left her alone in the 
house, with special warning against "the Foxe, 
maister of collusion " wlio has " voued thy last 
confusion," 

" Forthy, my Kiddie, be ruld by mee, 
And never give trust to his trecheree : 
And, if he chaunce come when I am abroade, 
Sperre the yate fast for fear of fraude : 
Ne for all his worst, nor for his best. 
Open the dore at his request." 



SPENSER 239 

So the mother goes her way, and soon the Foxe 
appears, disguised as a pedlar, and feigning sick- 
ness, with head and heel bound up, *' for with 
great cold he had gotte the gout." 

The poor Kid, falHng a victim to the pedlar's 
arts and his own pity combined, soon unfastens 
the door, and lets his enemy into the room. 

Then when the Kid is stooping over the big 
basket to find a bell which the Fox has purposely 
left there as a decoy, 

" He popt him in, and his basket did latch : 
Ne stayed he once the dore to make fast, 
But ranne awaye with him in all hast." 

The whole story is described with a charming 
lightness of detail and event. 

The April ^glogue is devoted, according to 
the custom of the day, to the "honor and 
prayse of our most gracious sovereigne, Queene 
Elizabeth," who is called throughout this poem 
Elysa. 

Hobbinoll and Thenott, two shepherds, talk 
together, and Hobbinoll records a song which 
Colin Clout (Spenser) made sometime, in honour 
of the maiden Queen : — 

" See, where she sits upon the grassie greene 
(O seemly sight !) 
Yclad in Scarlot, like a mayden Queene, 
And ermines white : 



240 IN SHAKSPERE'S ENGLAND 

Upon her head a Cremosin coronet, 
With Damaske roses and Dafifadillies set : 

Bay leaves between, 

And primroses greene, 
Embellish the sweete Violet. 

" Tell me, have ye seene her angelick face, 

Like Phoebe fayre ? 
Her heavenly haveour, her princely grace, 

Can you well compare ? 
The Redde rose medled with the White yfere. 
In either cheeke depeincten lively chere : 

Her modest eye, 

Her Majestic, 
Where have you seene the like but there?" 

There is something wonderful in the fashion of 
the time — even making allowance for a poet's 
metaphors — for so regarding the strong-willed and 
masterful daughter of Henry VIIL 

" Her heavenly haveour," as far as her courtiers 
went, consisted in alternately kissing and tickling 
them, and boxing their ears ; "her princely grace " 
was shown in language that would have done 
credit to an ale-house ; and of her " modestie," 
little has been recorded. 

With the publication of the " Shepherd's 
Calendar " Spenser leapt at once into public 
notice ; he paid a visit to the uncle of his friend 
Sidney, the all-powerful Earl of Leicester, and in 
1580 he was chosen by Lord Grey of Wilton to 
accompany him, as his secretary, to Ireland. 



SPENSER 241 ' 

The "good Lord Grey," as Spenser fondly 
called him, had just been appointed " to fill that 
great place which," as Dean Church says, " had 
wrecked the reputation, and broken the hearts of 
a succession of able and high-spirited servants of 
the English Crown, the place of Lord-Deputy in 
Ireland." 

Spenser describes him as " most gentle, affable, 
loving, and temperate ; always known to be a 
most just, sincere, godly, and right noble man, far 
from sternness, far from unrighteousness." And 
yet, so curious was the view then held as to 
" temperate and godly " dealings on the part of 
English authorities towards rebellious vassals, that 
the admiring secretary goes on to tell how his 
" good lord was blotted with the name of a bloody 
man, who regarded not the life of the Queen's 
subjects no more than dogs, and had wasted and 
consumed all, so as now she had nothing almost 
left, but to reign in their ashes." 

And yet in Ireland, this land of blood and 
misery, the rest of Edmund Spenser's life was 
almost entirely to be spent. And the influence of 
such a home, and of such an atmosphere as that 
in which he must have dwelt, is evident through- 
out his great work, the " Faerie Queene." His 
characters move no longer in " Eliza's blessed 



242 IN SHAKSPERE'S ENGLAND 

fields," in " merry London," or '' along the shore of 
silver-streaming Thames," but among lonely woods, 
and desolate places filled with evil and harmful 
men and beasts ; there is " the darksome cave," 

" On top whereof ay dwelt the ghastly Owle, 
Shrieking his balefull note, which ever drave 
Far from that haunt all other chearefull fowle, 
And all about it wandring ghostes did wayle and howle. 

And all about old stockes and stubs of trees, 
Whereon nor fruit nor leafe was ever seene, 
Did hang upon the ragged rocky knees ; 
On which had many wretches hanged beene. 
Whose carcases were scattered on the greene, 
And throwne about the cliffs." 

An all too true picture this of what the poet was 
himself to see on many a day in the distressful 
country where his lot was now cast. 

On the arrival of Lord Grey and his secretary, 
matters were at their worst. Smerwick, on the 
south-west coast of Kerry, had been fortified, and 
filled with men and stores by the united efforts of 
the Earl of Desmond, who was in open rebellion 
against the English, his allies from the Pope, 
and a dissatisfied band of Spanish and Italian 
adventurers. Then came the terrible struggle 
between the English and Irish forces, ending with 
such a scene at the taking of Smerwick as we can 
hardly bear now to picture ; it was the fashion in 



SPENSER 243 

which war was waged at the time, but even 
in war such scenes are now unknown. Lord 
Grey, after the capture of Smerwick, ends his 
dispatch thus : " There were six hundred slain. 
. . . Those that I gave Hfe unto, I have bestowed 
upon the captains and gentlemen whose service 
hath well deserved. ... Of the six hundred slain, 
four hundred were as gallant and goodly person- 
ages as of any (soldiers) I ever beheld. So hath 
it pleased the Lord of Hosts to deliver your 
enemies into your Highnesse's hand, and so too 
as one only excepted, not one of yours is either 
lost or hurt." 

Such was warfare in the country of Spenser's 
adoption, a country where, as Dean Church says, 
" the only law was disorder, and the only rule 
failure." 

In crushing, for the time, Desmond's rebellion, 
the south and west of Munster were reduced to 
absolute desolation, and the land was apportioned 
to " undertakers " — as they were styled — who were 
to colonise it from England. 

Among the list of these " undertakers" Spenser's 
name appears, and his home henceforward was 
Kilcolman Castle, beneath the Galtee Hills, in the 
north of County Cork. The house had once 
belonged to the ruined Earl of Desmond, as 



244 IN SHAKSPERE'S ENGLAND 

the new occupant was one day to learn to his 
cost. 

Spenser was made Clerk of Munster, and having 
no special opportunity of pushing his way in 
England, where poetry then by no means ensured 
a career to its author, he seems to have settled 
down contentedly to an Irish life ; he came to 
seek his fortune there, and, in a modified form, he 
found it. His life among the wild beauties of the 
Munster Hills, and the still wilder manners of 
their inhabitants, gave him perhaps a better 
opportunity for carrying on his great work 
of the '' Faerie Queene " than he could ever 
have found amid the dazzle of pageant and 
the stir and intrigue of life at the Court of 
Elizabeth. 

Be that as it may, it was under the shadow 
of the Galtee Mountains, in the Land of Brian 
Boru, and Malachy with his collar of gold, that 
the " Faerie Queene " grew into being. 

The work, as originally planned, was to have 
consisted of twelve books, in the twelfth of which, 
Elizabeth, under the guise of the Faerie Queene, 
was to have appeared. But the whole was 
never written. Six books, and a fragment of the 
seventh, are all we possess, but they are enough 
to mark the place of Edmund Spenser throughout 



SPENSER 245 

all time as one among the greatest poets the 
world has seen. 

It is to the worship of all that is true and 
beautiful and holy in life that the poem is 
dedicated. It is not well connected as a story, 
and the characters are faint and shadowy, but it 
is a wonderful picture of pure Christian knight- 
errantry riding upon its course through the 
darkest and most dangerous places of a troubled 
world, and the " light " always shining in the 
" darkness " much as that bright heaven-lit soul 
of Spenser's must have shone upon the sinful 
and sorrowful lives of the wild warriors among 
whom he lived. The first book contains the 
" Legend of the Red Cross Knight, or of Holi- 
nesse ; " the second, of " Sir Guyon, or of Tem- 
perance ; " the third, of " Britomart, or Chastity ; " 
the fourth of " Cambel and Triamond, or Friend- 
ship ; " the fifth is the " Legend of Artegall, or of 
Justice ; " the sixth of " Sir Calidore, or of Court- 
esie ; " and the cantos of the seventh which 
remain are on " Mutabelitie, under the Legend 
of Constance." 

In a conversation between himself and some of 
his friends, while composing the '' Faerie Queene," 
Spenser thus speaks of his conception, "To re- 
present all the moral vertues, assigning to every 



246 IN SHAKSPERE'S ENGLAND 

vertue a Knight to be the patron and defender 
of the same, in whose actions and feates of 
arms and chivalry the operations of that vertue, 
whereof he is the protector, are to be expressed, 
and the vices and unruly appetites that oppose 
themselves against the same, to be beaten down 
and overcome." 

His work was intended, before all things, to 
instil into the minds of his readers a love of all 
that was noble and just. He was one of the 
great workers of the day. While Drake and 
Raleigh were venturing their lives in search of 
golden lands beyond the sea, while Bacon was 
toiling to open men's minds to the boundless 
stores of the New Philosophy, and while faithful 
seekers after truth among priests alike of the 
old and new Catholicism were willingly spending 
their lives and shedding their blood for the sake 
of bringing men nearer to God, so among the 
shelter of the Irish hills the " New Poet " 
worked with loving and almost inspired toil, to 
bring before men's eyes a picture of good con- 
quering evil, and strength upholding weakness, in 
a more perfect form than English verse had ever 
yet seen. 

In 1589 Sir Walter Raleigh was visiting his 
Irish home at Youghal, not very far distant from 



SPENSER 247 

Kilcolman, and thither he came, and there he 
read the early part of the " Faerie Queene," and 
he recognised its merits at once, and persuaded 
Spenser to take the first three books to England, 
where they were published early in the following 
year, and met with an enthusiastic reception. 
This visit, and Spenser's consequent return to 
Court, led to his writing the poem entitled " Colin 
Clout's come home again," Colin, as before, re- 
presenting himself. 

After the years spent in lawless Ireland, heart- 
felt must have been the words in which he 
describes the blissful state of England, as it 
seemed to him : — 

" There all happie peace and plenteous store 
Conspire in one to make contented blisse. 
No wayling there nor wretchednesse is heard, 
No bloodie issues nor no leprosies, 
No griesly famine, nor no raging sweard, 
No nightly bordrags" — (border-raids) — "nor no hue and 

cries ; 
The shepheards there abroad may safely lie 
On hills and downes, withouten dread or daunger : 
No ravenous wolves the good man's hope destroy 
Nor outlawes fell affray the forest raunger. 
There learned arts do florish in great honor. 
And Poets wits are had in peerlesse price ; 
Religion hath lay powre to rest upon her, 
Advancing vertue and suppressing vice. 
For end, all good, all grace there freely growes, 
Had people grace it gratefully to use." 



248 IN SHAKSPERE'S ENGLAND 

He shows his obedience to the fashion of the 
time in his description of the charms of Elizabeth, 
then in her fifty-eighth year : — 

" But if I her like ought on earth might read, 
I would her lyken to a crowne of lillies, 
Upon a virgin brydes adorned head, 
With Roses dight and Goolds and Daffadillies. 

But vaine it is to thinke, by paragone 
Of earthly things, to judge of things divine : 
Her power, her mercy, her wisdome, none 
Can deeme, but who the Godhead can define." 

To her he dedicated his " Faerie Queene" in what 
Dean Church calls " one of the boldest dedications 
ever penned," but one which " has proved a pro- 
phecy " : — 

"to the most high, mightie, and magnificent . . . 
. . . ELIZABETH . . . 

EDMUND SPENCER DOTH, IN ALL HUMILITIE, DEDICATE, PRESENT, 

AND CONSECRATE THESE HIS LABOURS, TO LIVE 

WITH THE ETERNITIE OF HER FAME." 

In the brilliant atmosphere of the Court, amid 
its pleasures and its intrigues, which were new 
experiences in the poet's life, his next two years 
were spent, and some of his feelings on what he 
saw are told in the satirical poem he wrote at this 
time entitled, " Mother Hubberd's Tale of the Ape 
and the Fox." 



SPENSER 249 

There the wily ways of diplomacy are criti- 
cised, and the Churchmen, Peers, and a " rascall 
Commons," who all seem to him under the 
power of the " false Fox," who may easily stand 
for his life-long opponent Burghley. 

But Court life was not to Spenser's mind, nor 
had he much to gain by prolonging his stay there. 
So he again crossed the stormy channel, beyond 
which lay the still more stormy island which w^as 
to be his home till death. On Midsummer Day, 
1594, he took a wife from among the fair maids of 
Ireland. We know little of her but that she was 
called Elizabeth, and that she bore him two sons, 
whom he named Sylvanus and Peregrine. 

The rest of his life was devoted to the work of 
the '' Faerie Queene," and he returned no more to 
Court, but dwelt with his Irish bride in his castle 
of Kilcolman. 

There his '' Faerie Queene " grew in ever increas- 
ing beauty ; the majesty and music of his verse 
were such as the English language had never 
hitherto known : in the " Faerie Queene " he in- 
vented the stanza, now called by his name, with 
the long rolling line at the end of each verse. 
He had a keener eye for beauty than is given to 
most men, he saw it everywhere, and he knew 
how to paint it in words which made others see it 



250 IN SHAKSPERE'S ENGLAND 

too. The poem is not an easy one from which 
to quote, it must be read as a whole if one would 
understand its full beauty, and it is a strange 
mixture of religious fervour and classical and 
mediaeval allusion : as in the beautiful stanzas in 
Book I. where the old man, Contemplation, leads 
the Red Cross Knight up into the Mountain which 
he compares first to Mount Olivet, and then, 
in the same verse, to Parnassus. But, in spite 
of this incongruity, he paints more fairly than 
had yet been done the picture of the New 
Jerusalem : — 

"The new Hierusalem, that God has built 
For those to dwell in that are chosen his, 
His chosen people, purg'd from sinful guilt 
With pretious blood, which cruelly was spilt 
On cursed tree, of that unspotted lam, 
That for the sinnes of al the world was kilt." 

" Like that sacred hill, whose head full hie, 
Adorned with fruitfull Olives all around, 
Is, as it were, for endlesse memory 
Of that deare Lord who oft thereon was fownd, 
For ever with a flowing girlond crownd : 
Or like that pleasant Mount, that is for ay 
Through famous Poets verse each where renownd, 
On which the thrise three learned Ladies play 
Their heavenly notes, and make full many a lovely lay." 

And so the poem rolls grandly on, stanza after 
stanza, in magnificent monotony, that reminds one, 
says Dean Church, " of the grand monotony of the 



SPENSER 251 

seashore, where billow follows billow. . . . and 
spreads and rushes up in a last long line of foam 
upon the beach." 

The perfect knight of the poem may well be 
drawn from Sidney, with touches too of Raleigh, 
and of Spenser's own beloved master. Lord Grey ; 
the scenery and many of the scenes recall his 
wild Irish surroundings, and his wistful longing 
for pure religion shows his sympathy with the 
struggles of the Church. 

Thus there is historic interest underlying the 
work, apart from its poetic beauty, which should 
lead it to be studied even by those who may not 
be born with power to catch its full music. 

One would like to be able to picture the poet 
to the end, working out the great epic as he 
had planned it, in the lonely beauty of his Celtic 
home. 

But each one who loves the " Faerie Queene " 
must create for himself those last scenes which 
the master's hand was never to depict. Kilcolman 
had been his home, but it was not to be his last 
resting-place. 

Those to whom the castle had once belonged 
still harboured jealousy of the Saxon interloper ; 
in 1598 a fresh insurrection in Munster took 
place under the new Earl of Desmond, and the 



252 IN SHAKSPERE'S ENGLAND 

castle of Kilcolman was plundered, and burned to 
the ground. According to the account of Ben 
Jonson, a tiny new-born child of Spenser's was 
burned within the ruins. 

The poet and his wife fled to England ; but his 
spirit was gone, his heart was broken. He died 
in want and sorrow on January i6, 1599. 

One more career blighted, one more heart 
broken, " one task more unfilled, one more foot- 
path untrod," by association with that land which 
seems to carry hidden among the beauties of its 
outward show a robe of Nessus dipped in poison 
more fatal to the Saxon knight than was ever that 
of the Centaur to Attic hero. 

But of Spenser one cannot feel that the end 
clouded for long the glory of his memory. He 
lives, and will live always, in the stainless grandeur 
of his own Red Cross Knight, lighted by the soft 
radiance of his Faerie World in the land his 
fancy created for all time. 

It is not as the tired wanderer, fleeing across 
the sea in fear of his life, and dying poor and 
broken-hearted in the London which no longer 
knew him as its own, that we think of such as 
Edmund Spenser, but rather we hear his voice, 
still echoing down the ages from his time to ours, 
in those grand words he wrote so near the end, 



SPENSER 253 

and which have the solemn majesty of prophecy 
about them ; — 

" Then gin I thinke on that which Nature sayd, 
Of that same time when no more Change shall be, 
But stedfast rest of all things, firmely stayd 
Upon the pillours of Eternity, 
That is contrayr to Mutabilitie ; 
For all that moveth doth in Change delight : 
But thence-forth all shall rest eternally 
With Him that is the God of Sabaoth hight : 
O ! that great Sabaoth God, grant me that Sabaoths sight.'" 



CHAPTER XIII 

MARLOWE 

Rather more than ten years after Spenser, was 
born Christopher Marlowe, the greatest of Shak- 
spere's forerunners, who for the few short years of 
his Hfe gave to the world dramatic work full of 
noble promise. 

Kit Marlowe, as he was often called, was the 
son of John Marlowe, a shoemaker, and was born 
at Canterbury, where his mother's father was 
rector of St. Peter's Church. The boy was 
educated first at King's School, Canterbury, and 
later at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, which 
was then Benet College, where he took his B.A. 
degree in 1583, and his M.A. in 1587. 

It is probable that he was intended to follow 
the profession of his grandfather, and to become a 
clergyman, after receiving a classical training at 
the University, but as his character developed, it 
led him to follow a very different line of life. 

He went to London, and there became one of a 
brilliant and dissipated band of young men, play- 

854 



MARLOWE 255 

Wrights and actors, many of whom have left 
behind them valuable dramatic work. Thomas 
Kyd, Lyly, Peele and Greene were among the 
number, Sir Walter Raleigh was their friend, and 
all London was ready to appreciate their perfor- 
mances on the stage. Greene describes the wild 
life they led together, the mingling of good work 
with low company, which has always been the 
case with such men as Marlowe. At the time 
when Greene himself was " famoused for an arch 
play-making poet," his companions " were lightly 
the lewdest persons in the land, apt for pilfering, 
perjury, forgery, or any villainy, who," as he says, 
'' came still to my lodging, and these would 
continue quaffing, carousing, and surfeiting with 
me all day long." 

In such company Marlowe's life was spent, and 
to its character his premature death was due. Of 
the circumstances attending his end we know little, 
the bare fact remains that one of the most brilliant 
dramatic writers of the day, whose success seems 
to have been acknowledged by all his contem- 
poraries, was killed in a drunken brawl at Dept- 
ford, in June 1593, before he had reached the 
age of thirty. His work has therefore the added 
interest of never having reached such a maturity 
as it might have done ; we see the genius in what 



256 IN SHAKSPERE'S ENGLAND 

remains, we can only imagine what might have 
been had he Hved. 

His work is almost entirely dramatic, and he 
appears to have taken part in the performance of 
his own plays. 

Permanent theatres had lately begun to be 
erected ; the miracle and morality plays of earlier 
times, with their companies of strolling-players, 
had given place to more consecutive and historical 
pieces, and at first Lord Leicester and other great 
noblemen had been in the habit of supporting 
private dramatic companies. 

The boys, or " children " as they were called, 
of the great schools in London, used to perform 
plays at certain times, and seemed formidable 
rivals to the older players. 

Leicester, being all powerful with the Queen, 
obtained permission for his company of actors to 
perform inside the walls of London, but the cor- 
poration of the City was much against such per- 
formances, partly on account of the doubtful 
nature of many of the pieces acted, and partly 
because of the constant risk in contagion from the 
plague in such a close-packed and unwholesome 
atmosphere. 

This led to the erection of certain play-houses 
or " theaters " outside the boundaries of the 



MARLOWE 257 

London city walls, of which the first was called 
the '' Theater," and was situated in Shoreditch ; 
soon after its erection came others, the " Curtain," 
the " Rose," and the " Swan." 

In these play-houses, with scanty scenery, often 
consisting merely of a sign-post bearing the name 
of the spot where the action was supposed to take 
place, without music, lights, or modern accessories, 
one may fancy the great men of the time, resting 
from their labour on land or sea, and watching 
the moving figures and listening to the thrilling 
words of the greatest dramas that England has ever 
produced. 

Marlowe's work, although partly contemporary in 
point of time, essentially prefaces that of Shakspere. 
His plays are vivid, imaginative, and thrilling, but 
his work is not creative, and his characters lack life ; 
there is a broad line between his work and that of 
the mighty dramatist whose figures live for ever- 
more. Marlowe's personages, except the central 
figure in each drama, have little vitality, and he 
could never draw a woman. 

But his work is powerful, rich, and vivid, and 
stands always secure in its place in the literature 
of his country, although somewhat overshadowed 
by the fame of his mighty successor. 

His first play, " Tamburlaine," was drawn partly 

R 



258 IN SHAKSPERE'S ENGLAND 

from a Spanish source, and is the tale of a Scythian 
shepherd who rises by great and savage deeds to 
be lord over the Eastern World. He gives his 
own idea of the play in his Prologue to the First 
Part : — 

" From jigging veins of rhyming mother wits, 
And such conceits as clownage keeps in pay, 
We'll lead you to the stately tent of war, 
Where you shall hear the Scythian Tamburlaine 
Threatening the world with high astounding terms, 
And scourging kingdoms with his conquering sword. 
View but his picture in this tragic glass, 
And then applaud his fortune as you please." 

Tamburlaine's own figure stands out vividly in 
contrast to the shadowy description of most of 
the other characters in the play ; in appearance 
he is 

" Of stature tall, and straightly fashionM, 
Like his desire, lift upward and divine ; 
So large of limbs, his joints so strongly knit, 
Such breadth of shoulders as might mainly bear 
Old Atlas's burden ; — 'twixt his manly pitch, 
A pearl, more worth than all the world, is placed, 
Wherein by curious sovereignity of art 
Are fixed his piercing instruments of sight, 
Whose fiery circles bear encompassed 
A heaven of heavenly bodies in their spheres, 
That guides his steps and actions to the throne, 
Where honour sits invested royally : 
Pale of complexion, wrought in him with passion. 
Thirsting with sovereignity and love of arms ; 
His lofty brows in folds do figure death. 



MARLOWE 259 

And in their smoothness, amity, and Hfe ; 

About them hangs a note of amber hair, 

Wrapped in curls, as fierce Achilles was. 

On which the breath of Heaven delights to play, 

Making it dance with wanton majesty. — 

His arms and fingers, long and sinewy. 

Betokening valour and excess of strength ; 

In every part proportioned like the man 

Should make the world subdued to Tamburlaine." 

He goes on his victorious career, subduing the 
world before him ; the Persian commander sent 
against him he persuades, apparently without diffi- 
culty, to fight on his side, and he conquers the 
Turkish Emperor, and all his forces. Bajazeth, 
his captive, he keeps, according to the custom of 
Louis XL, in an iron cage, which in this case seems 
to be portable, as the unfortunate Emperor is 
brought in to the banquet by slaves, and is 
taunted and mocked by Tamburlaine on refusing 
to take food like a beast through the bars of the 
cage. 

Parts of the play are truely mediaeval in the 
savage spirit they breathe, as in the scene when 
Bajazeth and his wife Zabina, unable to bear their 
sufferings longer, dash out their brains against the 
iron bars of the Emperor's prison. 

Tamburlaine, like so many rude heroes of the 
time, has one soft spot in his fierce heart, and 
that is his love for his captive Egyptian bride, 



26o IN SHAKSPERE'S ENGLAND 

Zenocrate, the daughter of the Soldan. He 
addresses her as 

" Zenocrate, the loveliest maid alive, 
Fairer than rocks of pearl and precious stone, 
The only paragon of Tamburlaine, 
Whose eyes are brighter than the lamps of Heaven, 
And speech more pleasant than sweet harmony ! 
That with thy looks canst clear the darkened sky, 
And calm the rage of thundering Jupiter, 
Sit down by her, adorned with my crown, 
As if thou wert the Empress of the world." 

And all his honours, in true knightly style, he is 
ready to lay at her feet. The First Book ends 
with his speech to her, before their wedding, 
when he crowns her 

" Queen of Persia 
And all the kingdoms and dominions 
That late the power of Tamburlaine subdued." 

In the Second Book they are married, and 
there is a vivid picture given of them with their 
three little sons, and of the boys' talk, and their 
father's answers. Tamburlaine's heart seems to 
have undergone no softening through age or the 
growth of paternal emotions ; he angrily upbraids 
one of the boys who shows a less martial spirit 
than his brothers, and when he wishes to encourage 
the youngest, who, according to his mother, seems 



MARLOWE 261 

somewhat precociously valiant, his early punish- 
ment of his fallen foe Bajazeth returns to his 
mind, and he promises the boy, 

"If thou wilt love the wars and follow me, 
Thou shalt be made a king, and reign with me, 
Keeping in iron cages emperors." 

His wife seems somewhat weary of his martial 
prowess, and asks him : — 

" Sweet Tamburlaine, when wilt thou leave these arms. 
And save thy sacred person free from scathe. 
And dangerous chances of the wrathful war ? " 

But he answers her, much as warlike husbands 
in all ages have answered peace-loving wives : — 

" When Heaven shall cease to move on both the poles. 
And when the ground, whereon my soldiers march, 
Shall rise aloft and touch the horned moon. 
And not before, my sweet Zenocrate." 

And his inborn love of war makes his dearest 
wish for his sons that they shall carry on his 
deeds of valour : — 

"When I am old" (he says), "and cannot manage arms, 
Be thou the scourge and terror of the world." 

The most beautiful scene in the play is the 
death of Zenocrate, when Tamburlaine sits beside 
her bed, and the boys stand waiting with the 



262 IN SHAKSPERE'S ENGLAND 

physicians, who can do no more to arrest the 

advance of . the one foe against whom the mighty 

Scythian warrior is powerless. 

His love for his dying wife seems to enable 

Tamburlaine to realise for one moment a higher 

bliss than that which he has hitherto craved ; he 

seems to go a little way in spirit with her, and to 

see where "walk the angels on the walls of 

Heaven ; " and as his passionate love follows her 

there, he cries to all the glories of that blessed 

land, 

" The chrystal streams, whose taste illuminates 
Refined eyes with an eternal sight, 
Like tried silver, run through Paradise, 
To entertain divine Zenocrate. 
The cherubims and holy seraphims. 
That sing and play before the King of Kings, 
Use all their voices and their instruments 
To entertain divine Zenocrate. 
And in this sweet and curious harmony. 
The God that tunes this music to our souls, 
Holds out his hand in highest majesty 
To entertain divine Zenocrate." 

As a farewell to the dying it would be hard 
to surpass these lines in their wailing pathos 
and beauty. Zenocrate dies, and with her much 
of the interest of the play, which runs its course 
of savage war and bloodshed, until the con- 
quering chief rejoins the wife whose body he 
has kept embalmed at his side, and he quits 



MARLOWE 263 

the stage of life with the somewhat arrogant 
words — 

" For Tamburlaine, the scourge of God, must die." 

Marlowe's next dramatic work is perhaps his 
most popular. 

"The Tragical History of Dr. Faustus" is 
founded on the old legend of the man who sells 
his soul to the Prince of Darkness. A certain 
Dr. Faustus, who studied at various German 
universities in the beginning of the sixteenth 
century, had dealt in necromancy, and the legend 
became gradually identified with him, so that 
Marlowe adopted his name for the hero of the 
new play. 

The fascination of the subject, and the skill and 
power with which it was worked out, brought the 
play instant popularity on the stage. The part of 
Dr. Faustus was taken by Alieyn, the great tragic 
actor of the day, who had also played the part of 
Tamburlaine. 

The scene opens with an explanatory chorus, 
and then Faustus appears alone in his study, and 
in a fine soliloquy mourns the limits of the know- 
ledge to which he has been able to attain even 
after a life spent in intellectual labour. 

And it is for " infinite knowledge " that he agrees 



264 IN SHAKSPERE'S ENGLAND 

to sell his soul to Mephistopheles, servant of Lucifer, 
Prince of Darkness. 

There is a magnificent piece of dialogue between 
Dr. Faustus and Mephistopheles, in which the lost 
spirit seems always trying to prevent another from 
suffering his own awful fate. 

" Tell me," asks Faustus, "what is that Lucifer, thy lord?" 
Meph. Arch-regent and commander of all spirits. 
Faust. Was not that Lucifer an angel once ? 
Meph. Yes, Faustus and most dearly loved of God. 
Faust. How comes it then that he is Prince of devils? 
Meph. O, by aspiring pride and insolence ; 
For which God threw him from the face of Heaven. 

They talk awhile, then Faustus is left alone. 
Later on, Good and Evil Angels come to him, and 
each gives him counsel as to whether or no he 
should make the proposed bargain. 

" Sweet Faustus, think of Heaven, and heavenly things," 

entreats the Good Angel, but at his ear the Evil 
Angel tempts him — 

" No, Faustus, think of honour and of wealth." 

The Evil Angel triumphs, Mephistopheles re- 
turns, and the agreement is made. 

Faustus is to have twenty-four years of life, with 
infinite knowledge, and then he is to become the 
property, body and soul, of Lucifer, the Prince of 
Darkness. 



MARLOWE 265 

The compact is ratified in a legal document 
which Faustus reads aloud, and which ends with 
the awful words : — 

" I, John Faustus, ... do give both body and soul 
to Lucifer, Prince of the East, and his minister, 
Mephistopheles : and furthermore grant unto them, 
that twenty-four years being expired, the articles 
above written inviolate, full power to fetch or carry 
the said John Faustus, body and soul, flesh, blood, 
or goods, into their habitation wheresoever. By 
me, John Faustus." 

The knowledge for which the unhappy man has 
paid so dearly is his ; all his questions are answered, 
all his wishes fulfilled, and Mephistopheles becomes 
for the time his servant. But with the return of 
the Good Angel comes horror at his own act, and 
his agonised cry 

"Ah, Christ my Saviour, 
Seek to save distressed Faustus's soul ! " 

Then Lucifer himself appears for the first time, 
and answers his cry with the terrible words : — 

" Christ cannot save thy soul, for He is just ; 
There's none but I have interest in the same." 

Next enter the seven deadly sins, and Faustus 
receives the knowledge for which he has bartered 



266 IN SHAKSPERE'S ENGLAND 

all, and shows his power before the Emperor at 
the banquet, making Alexander the Great and other 
departed spirits appear at his call as if by magic. 

The story runs on, and the awful end looms 
gradually nearer, till in scene xiii. it is prefaced 
by Wagner, Faustus's servant, in the homely 
words : — 

" I think my master shortly means to die, 
For he hath given to me all his goods." 

Faustus receives one last exhortation to repent- 
ance, even at this hour, from an old man who 
enters in scene xiv., and urges him to seek 
peace in words of simple pathos and beauty ; — 

" Ah, Doctor Faustus, that I might prevail 
To guide thy steps unto the way of life, 
By which sweet path thou may'st attain the goal 
That shall conduct thee to celestial rest ! 
Break heart, drop blood, and mingle it with tears, 
Tears falling from repentant heaviness 
Of ... . 

.... crimes of heinous sins 
As no commiseration may expel. 
But mercy, Faustus, of thy Saviour sweet, 
Whose blood alone must wash away thy guilt." 

But his words avail nothing, and the shadow 
of doom draws still nearer. 

There is a last scene with his scholar friends, 
who stay with him until one hour before mid- 



MARLOWE 267 

night, at which time his fate is to be decided ; 
they leave him with words of sorrowful farewell : — 

" Pray thou, and we will pray that God may have mercy 
upon thee.'' 

And he is left alone, with "one bare hour to 
live." 

His last soliloquy is too terrible to quote ; he 
realises too late what he has done, and that he 
has brought the doom upon himself. The clock 
strikes twelve, and Lucifer and his attendants rush 
in and bear him away ; and in the pathetic words 
of the final chorus : — 

" Cut is the branch that might have grown full straight, 
And burned is Apollo's laurel bough, 
That sometimes grew within this learned man. 
Faustus is gone." 

It was no wonder that such a play, so finely 
worked out, and dealing with so heart-rending a 
theme, should have at once captured the attention 
of the Elizabethan stage. 

In " The Jew of Malta," Marlowe's next work, 
we have an entirely different story. Perhaps the 
most interesting feature in the play to modern 
readers is the fact that Shakspere's Shylock was 
probably drawn from the Jew Barabas. 

Barabas's love of his wealth is even more of a 
passion than was that of Shylock for his, but 



268 IN SHAKSPERE'S ENGLAND 

Barabas is something beyond a mere miser, his 
love for his wealth, his 

" Bags of fiery opals, sapphires, amethysts, 
Jacinths, hard topaz, grass-green emeralds, 
Beauteous rubies, sparkling diamonds, 
And seld-seen [seldom seen] costly stones of so great price," 

becomes at times a feeling so exalted that he sees 
in his jewels, 

" Infinite riches in a little room ; " 

so he speaks, in the soliloquy in his counting- 
house with which the play opens. 

His merchant friends come in and tell him of 
the safe arrival of his ships : — 

" Laden with riches, and exceeding store 
Of Persian silks, of gold, and orient pearl," 

and his satisfaction seems complete. 

Then comes the news that the whole of his 
dearly-prized wealth is to be snatched from him, 
confiscated by the Governor of Malta to pay a 
Turkish tribute, which there is no other means of 
raising. 

The wailing cry of the persecuted Jew, which 
through all ages has thrilled men's hearts in Shy- 
lock's words, is heard in the simple question 

" Will you then steal my goods ? 
Is theft the ground of your religion?" 



MARLOWE 269 

And Ferneze, the Governor, answers : — 

" No, Jew, we take particularly thine, 
To save the ruin of a multitude : 
And better one want for the common good, 
Than many perish for a private man : 
Yet, Barabas, we will not banish thee. 
But here, in Malta, where thou got'st thy wealth. 
Live still ; and if thou canst, get more." 

This speech fairly represents the attitude of a 
kind-hearted official of the day in dealing with a 
Jew of wealth ; and Barabas replies hopelessly ; — 

"Christians, what or how can I multiply? 
Of naught is nothing made." 

The officers come in and announce : — - 

" We have seized upon the goods 
And wares of Barabas, which being valued, 
Amount to more than all the wealth in Malta." 

And Barabas cries bitterly to the Governor : — 

" Well, then, my lord, say, are you satisfied ? 
You have my goods, my money, and my wealth, 
My ships, my store, and all that I enjoy'd ; 
And, having all, you can request no more ; 
Unless your unrelenting flinty hearts 
Suppress all pity in your stony breasts, 
And now shall move you to bereave my life." 

But Ferneze, strong in the aversion of the day 
to the success not so much of the unbeliever in 



270 IN SHAKSPERE'S ENGLAND 

Christianity, as of the prosperous foreign financier, 
answers virtuously : — 

" No, Barabas, to stain our hands with blood 
Is far from us and our profession." 

To which the Jew makes the somewhat pertinent 
reply : — 

"Why, I esteem the injury far less 
To take the lives of miserable men 
Than be the causers of their misery. 
You have my wealth, the labour of my life, 
The comfort of mine age, my children's hope, 
And therefore ne'er distinguish of the wrong." 

But his words avail nothing, and his money is 
taken to pay the Turkish tribute. 

His daughter Abigail, who is a far more dutiful 
child to him than is ever Jessica to Shylock, comes 
and tells him that his house has been turned into 
a nunnery, and this gives him an opportunity of 
recovering part of his lost wealth. 

Some of his treasure is hidden in the house, and 
he persuades Abigail to offer herself to the Lady 
Abbess as a nun, in order to gain access to the 
money ; and on an appointed night, she is to 
throw down his beloved bags of gold to him from 
an upper window. The scene in which she parts 
from him to go with the Abbess and the Friar is 
excellent, Barabas alternately reviling her aloud 



MARLOWE 271 

for being " amongst these hateful Christians," and 
whispering to her to 

" Think upon the jewels and the gold." 

And to remember that 

" The board is marked thus that covers it." 

The plan is carried out, and in the first scene 
of Act II. Abigail appears at the window, and calls 
to her father waiting below : — 

" Here behold, unseen, where I have found 
The gold, the pearls, and jewels." 

His excited exclamations of satisfaction both at 
regaining his money and at the filial behaviour of 
his daughter, again recall Shylock strongly to our 
minds. 

Abigail throws down the bags, and calls to 
him : — 

" Here, hast thou't ? 
There's more, and more, and more." 

And he cries : — 

" O my girl, 
My gold, my fortune, my felicity ! 
Strength to my soul, death to mine enemy ! 
Welcome the first beginner of my bliss ! 
O Abigail, Abigail, that I had thee here too ! 
Then my desires were fully satisfied ; 
But I will practise thy enlargement thence : 
O girl ! O gold ! O beauty ! O my bliss ! " 



272 IN SHAKSPERE'S ENGLAND 

And so his daughter leaves him, hugging to his 
breast his rescued bags of treasure. 

The rest of the play is far inferior in interest to 
these early scenes. Abigail falls in love with a 
Christian, but Barabas's paternal gratitude for her 
recovery of his gold is not sufficiently strong to 
enable him to tolerate the idea of a Christian son- 
in-law, so he compasses the death of the unfortu- 
nate lover, and Abigail returns to the convent, and 
becomes a nun in reality. 

The end of the plot, by which Barabas becomes 
the means of his own destruction, is ingenious, 
but there is little of general interest in the later 
scenes, and the very fact of Barabas being so like 
Shylock only makes the contrast more marked 
between the working out of the two stories. 

The play of " Edward II.," which was Marlowe's 
last complete drama, shows a marked advance in 
power of construction on his previous work. 

In both Tamburlaine and Faustus the interest 
centred round one figure, leaving the other char- 
acters little more than shadowy forms. 

In " Edward II." there are other figures well 
defined besides that of the unfortunate hero ; 
Gaveston, Mortimer, and the Queen, who is 
Marlowe's best drawn woman, all move across 
the stage in a life-like manner. 



MARLOWE 273 

The play deals with the historical facts of the 
reign of the unhappy Edward, and ends with his 
murder in Berkeley Castle. 

His infatuation for Gaveston is well drawn, and 
the anger and contempt which it excites in the 
ambitious mind of the Queen. 

" In vain I look for love at Edward's hand, 
Whose eyes are fixed on none but Gaveston. 
Yet once more I'll importune him with prayer : 
If he be strange and not regard my words, 
My son and I will over into France, 
And to the King my brother there complain, 
How Gaveston hath robbed me of his love : 
But yet I hope my sorrows will have end, 
And Gaveston this blessed day be slain." 

And the favourite too, with his foreign airs and 
graces, his '' short Italian hooded cloak loaded 
with pearl," and his " Tuscan cap " containing " a 
jewel of more value than the crown," is drawn 
with masterly insight. The play follows the 
historical course of events : Gaveston is sentenced 
to death on the block, and his place in the King's 
affections is given to Despenser, or Spencer, as 
Marlowe calls him. 

Mortimer's rise in power is well described, until, 
to use his own words — 

" The prince I rule, the queen do I command, 
And with a lowly conje to the ground 
The proudest lords salute me as I pass ; 
I seal, I cancel, I do what I will," 

S 



274 IN SHAKSPERE'S ENGLAND 

The horrible murder in the lonely castle among 
the Gloucestershire hills is accomplished, and is 
afterwards avenged by the young Prince Edward, 
who orders Mortimer to suffer the just punishment 
of his crimes. 

And the Earl meets his fate with the same 
jaunty courage — if we may use such an expression 
— that so many courtiers of the time had the 
opportunity of exhibiting. 

His last speech rolls forth in some of the finest 
lines Marlowe ever penned — 

" Base Fortune, now I see that in thy wheel 
There is a point, to which when men aspire 
They tumble headlong down : that point I touched, 
And seeing there was no place to mount up higher, 
Why should I grieve at my declining fall ? 
Farewell, fair Queen ; weep not for Mortimer, 
That scorns the world, and, as a traveller, 
Goes to discover countries yet unknown." 

" Edward II." was almost the last of Marlowe's 
works, as in construction and melody it was 
certainly his finest. 

In the " Massacre of Paris " he dealt with the 
terrible " Eve of St. Bartholmew " — still fresh in 
men's minds — and in " Hero and Leander " he pro- 
duced an unfinished but fine narrative poem ; his 
work showed such rapid advance and improve- 
ment as made its premature end the more to be 
deplored. 



MARLOWE 275 

It is pleasanter to picture him in his work than 
in his Hfe, to see him drawing with a master 
hand such figures as Tamburlaine, Faustus, and 
Gaveston, and planning for the future even more 
perfect dramatic work ; and it is sad to think 
that such a future was never realised. The end 
came to those great Elizabethan figures in many 
different forms, and with varying tragedy, but 
perhaps in all that it implies, more really tragic 
than hasty burial beneath far-off Western waters, 
than death on a foreign battlefield, or even on 
an English scaffold, is the end of the brilliant 
dramatist, Christopher Marlowe, done to death by 
a ruffianly associate in a drunken tavern brawl. 



CHAPTER XIV 

SHAKSPERE 

At first sight it seems strange that while the lives 
of so many of his contemporaries should lie open 
to the gaze of all, that of Shakspere himself should 
be wrapped in such dim shadows. But perhaps 
this is best : his world is that of his own creation ; 
there figures move and speak with gestures and 
words so instinct with human vitality, that we lose 
all sense of their being creations of his brain. 
His work is, as it were, a dream so vivid and so 
beautiful, that we put the thought of the dreamer 
out of sight, lest we lose the sense of the reality of 
the dream. 

With most men it is interesting to study the 
steps by which their experience in life was gained, 
to know their surroundings, their worldly diffi- 
culties and successes, but one hardly feels this 
with the giant form of Shakspere. 

" Others abide our question. Thou art free. 
We ask and ask. — Thou smilest and art still, 
Out-topping knowledge." 

276 



SHAKSPERE 277 

" Thou, who did'st the stars and sunbeams know, 
Self-school'dj self-scann'd, self-honour'd, self-secure, 
Did'st stand on earth unguess'd at. — Better so ! 

All pains the immortal spirit must endure, 

All weakness which impairs, all griefs which bow, 

Find their sole voice in that victorious brow." 

And in spite of the loving toil which many 
great men have given to the study of his life, he 
still stands "on earth unguess'd at." 

Of his parentage, home, and surroundings we 
know something, of himself hardly anything but 
that which can be drawn from these, and from 
his works. 

William Shakspere was the son of John Shak- 
spere, a well-to-do trader in corn, wool, meat, and 
skins. He has been called at one time a glover, 
and at another a butcher, and also a husband- 
man from the share he took in the family farm 
at Snitterfield, in Warwickshire. 

In 155 1 John Shakspere moved to Stratford- 
on-Avon, and there in the little wood-gabled 
house, near where the beautiful church keeps 
watch above the Avon, and surrounded by the 
green fields of Warwickshire, the greatest English- 
man was born. 

He was baptized in the parish church on April 
26th, 1564; his mother was Mary, the daughter 
of a small Warwickshire landowner, Robert Arden, 



278 IN SHAKSPERE'S ENGLAND 

and William was her third child ; her two little 
daughters, Joan and Margaret, had both been 
christened in Stratford church, but both died in 
infancy. 

Later on, several more children were born to 
the Shaksperes, three sons and two daughters, 
who all lived to grow up, except one little girl. 
The four brothers all went to the grammar 
school of the town, where they were entitled to 
a free education as soon as they had learned to 
read, and where they were taught English and 
Latin according to the fashion of the day, and 
possibly Greek. John Shakspere's income did not 
increase as time went on, and he was obliged to 
remove his promising eldest son from school, and 
he probably took him, for a time at least, to 
assist in his own business. 

But, genius though he was, William Shakspere 
did no more to ease the burden on his father's 
shoulders than many a commonplace son has 
done since his time ; on the contrary, at the age 
of eighteen and a half he married " the daughter," 
says Rowe, "of one Hathaway, said to have been 
a substantial yeoman in the neighbourhood of 
Stratford." 

All visitors to the pretty Warwickshire town 
will remember the field-path that leads over the 



SHAKSPERE 279 

meadows to where " Anne Hathaway's cottage " 
stands, and to which so many guides are eager to 
conduct the wandering Shaksperian student. 

Anne Hathaway was eight years older than her 
husband, and the bond of affection between them 
does not appear to have been strong. 

Three children were born, a daughter, Susanna, 
in the first year of their marriage, and twins two 
years later, who were baptized as Hamnet and 
Judith in the parish church on February 2nd, 
1585. It seems to have been shortly after their 
birth that Shakspere left his family and went to 
London — the magnet then, as now, for all great 
and discontented spirits. 

Rowe, writing in 1709, says that the immediate 
reason of Shakspere's departure was a poaching 
affray in which he was concerned. " He had, by 
a misfortune common enough to young fellows, 
fallen into ill company, and, among them, some, 
that made a frequent practice of deer-stealing, 
engaged him with them more than once in rob- 
bing a park that belonged to Sir Thomas Lucy of 
Charlecote near Stratford. For this he was prose- 
cuted by that gentleman, as he thought somewhat 
too severely ; and in order to revenge that ill- 
usage, he made a ballad upon him, and though 
this, probably the first essay of his poetry, be lost. 



28o IN SHAKSPERE'S ENGLAND 

yet it is said to have been so very bitter that it 
redoubled the prosecution against him to that 
degree that he was obliged to leave his business 
and friends in Warwickshire and shelter himself in 
London." Well can we imagine the anger of the 
slow-witted Midland squire at being subjected to 
the scathing wit of the poaching-poet ! 

So to London Shakspere went, and was soon 
incorporated into one of the theatrical companies 
lately formed, probably that belonging to the Earl 
of Leicester, and there he filled at first but the 
humble role of prompter's attendant, or call-boy. 
Jonson writes of him that his " first expedient 
was to wait at the door of the playhouse, and hold 
the horses of those that had no servants, that they 
might be ready again after the performance." 

London has seen great changes, but perhaps 
none greater than the contrast between the crowds 
which now patiently throng the streets waiting 
for the performance of "Twelfth Night" or 
''The Merchant of Venice," where once the 
author, an unknown homeless wanderer, earned 
the price of his next meal by holding a gentle- 
man's horse ! 

Although his writings soon brought him wide- 
spread fame, Shakspere kept to the profession of 
an actor almost until his death, and travelled pro- 



SHAKSPERE 281 

bably with his company through a large part of 
England. The London theatrical companies of 
his day were accustomed to go " on tour " just 
as they do now, and rich material for his work 
must he have found while journeying from town 
to town and county to county. 

As a boy he had probably seen some of the 
Morality Plays performed in Warwickshire, and 
when in the summer of 1575 all the countryside 
gathered to behold the pageants given at Kenil- 
worth in honour of the Queen's visit to Leicester, 
it is not unlikely that the schoolboy may have 
caught the infection and trudged to see the show, 
over the fifteen miles that separated Kenilworth 
from Stratford. 

Unlike many men of genius he had not to 
struggle long for worldly success : within ten years 
of his departure from Stratford he was being 
petitioned thence for help in local difficulties, as 
a man of assured wealth and position ; and his 
friendship, at first that of a suitor to a patron, 
with the young Lord Southampton, in whom some 
have seen the Will of his Sonnets, seems to date 
from this period, when he had special leisure for 
writing, as the London theatres were closed on 
account of an outbreak of the plague. 

His literary work seems to have occupied little 



282 IN SHAKSPERE'S ENGLAND 

more than twenty years, but in it he has left us 
literature for a lifetime. 

In 1 60 1 his father died, and Shakspere inherited 
the Stratford house in Henley Street, in which he 
had been born, and also the one adjoining it ; and 
in the following year he purchased for the sum 
of ;^32o one hundred and seven acres of arable 
land in the parish of Old Stratford, and also a 
cottage close by, with two orchards, gardens, and 
barns. His home still seems to have been in 
London, but he paid visits to his native place from 
time to time, where it seemed his ambition was 
one day to hold a place among the landed gentry. 

Little did he dream of the place he was to hold 
among all nations and for all time ! 

In 1607 his daughter Susanna married a well- 
to-do Stratford doctor, and in the next year the 
sorrow of his mother's death came upon him. It 
must have been shortly after this that he returned to 
live at Stratford among his old friends, and though 
he did not sever his connection with London, his 
home was henceforth in the little town among the 
meadows of Warwickshire. 

At Stratford he had been born, and at Strat- 
ford he died, on Tuesday, April 23rd, 1616, at 
the age of fifty-two. He was buried in the 
chancel of the line old parish church, and on 



SHAKSPERE 283 

the flat stone above his grave were carved the 
words : — 

" Good friend, for Jesu's sake forbeare 
To dig the dust enclosed heare ; 
Bleste be the man that spares these stones, 
And curst be he that moves my bones.'' 

The rough lines, which have been ascribed to 
Shakspere himself, have served to keep his grave 
from sacrilege, and " they still hedge with a 
peculiarly solemn awe the modest sepulchre that 
holds the precious dust of England's ' Star of 
Poets.' " 

Unlike the other great men of his time, his life 
was one of steadily increasing prosperity, and he died 
the death of a respectable and lamented citizen. 

He who could paint tragedy as no Englishman 
has done before or since, seems to have lived the 
one comparatively uneventful life among his great 
contemporaries ; his greatness lies in what he was, 
not in what he did. He needed no personal ex- 
periences from which to draw the figures or 
passions of his plays ; to his vast intellect and 
creative power outward impressions were un- 
necessary ; while he pursued the ordinary routine 
of his life his mind moved in a world of its own, 
and of that world he has left us the picture com- 
plete : there move figures, seen through the mists 



2S4 IN SHAKSPERE'S ENGLAND 

of more than four hundred years, as hfe-Hke still, 
as real and as fascinating as are any of the states- 
men, knights, or ladies, any of the explorers by 
sea or land of the great Elizabethan Age. 

To deal with Shakspere's plays and poems is 
the task of wise and learned men who have given 
their lives to the study of his works ; it seems 
almost impertinent to attempt to touch upon 
them at all in such pages as these. But for 
the sake of young students who are beginning to 
open the vast treasure-house of his knowledge, it 
may be helpful to put clearly some of the divisions 
by which his work has been classified ; and for our 
own sake perhaps we may be allowed to linger for 
a moment in that world of ever-living charm, and 
to touch once more with a loving hand old friends 
who have grown up with us from childhood, to 
listen again to Falstaff's cheery mirth, or Shylock's 
broken-hearted cry, to the battle sounds round 
Hotspur and Prince Hal, the dainty fun in the 
warm, sweet Midsummer Night, or the wit and 
brilliancy of such women as no man else has ever 
drawn, Portia, Rosalind, and Beatrice. 

Shakspere's plays have been divided by Pro- 
fessor Dowden into four periods, the first of 
which contains his Early Comedies, Early History, 
and Early Tragedy. 



SHAKSPERE 285 

In 1590 was written "Love's Labour's Lost," 
which was followed in the two succeeding years 
by the " Comedy of Errors," and the " Two 
Gentlemen of Verona," and about 1593 by "Mid- 
summer Night's Dream." In it he created a fairy 
world peopled with figures of fantastic grace 
and beauty, and in Titania, the Fairy Queen, may 
be one more compliment paid to the Virgin 
Queen of England ; Puck plays his pranks, and 
Oberon holds sway over his fairy kingdom in a 
wonderful world of mingled fancy and reality. 
And in contrast to this is the delightful comedy 
of the acting by Bottom, Quince, and their friends, 
beginning with their preparations for it in Quince's 
house, when he produces a " scroll of every man's 
name, which is thought fit, through all Athens, to 
play in our interlude before the duke and duchess 
on his wedding-day at night." He calls the roll, 
and the company answer to their names, and have 
their parts assigned to them, with suggestions as 
to how to play them, ending with Snug, the joiner, 
who is to personate the lion. 

Says Snug : " Have you the lion's part written ? 
Pray you, if it be, give it me, for I am slow of 
study." 

And Quince allows : " You may do it extempore, 
for it is nothing but roaring." 



286 IN SHAKSPERE'S ENGLAND 

At which Bottom, who is to be the hero Pyra- 
mus, entreats : '' Let me play the Hon, too. I will 
roar, that I will do any man's heart good to hear 
me ; I will roar, that I will make the duke say, 
' Let him roar again, let him roar again.' " 

And in the performance, lest the gentle ladies 
be frightened, Snug announces himself by name 
before beginning upon the well-rehearsed roaring. 

The two Historical Plays which belong to this 
First Period of Shakspere's work, are " Henry VL" 
and ''Richard III.," and then comes, probably his 
earliest tragedy, " Romeo and Juliet." 

This was founded on an Italian story, which 
had already been reproduced both in French and 
English before it was touched by the master hand 
of Shakspere, and through him rendered immortal. 
The play was published in quarto, in 1597, "as it 
hath been often (with great applause) plaid pub- 
liquely by the right Honourable L[ord] of Huns- 
don, his servants." 

The tale is fascinating from the first, and it runs 
its tragic course within the space of a few days. 
The unhappy young lovers, children of rival houses, 
meet on Sunday, are made one by marriage on 
Monday, and parted on Tuesday, to be re-united 
only in death on the evening of Thursday. , 

The Third Period of Shakspere's work is the 



SHAKSPERE 287 

largest, and begins with the Middle History Plays, 
"Richard II." and "King John"; then comes 
Middle Comedy in " The Merchant of Venice," 
and then Later History in " Henry IV." and 
"Henry V.," and Later Comedy in the "Taming 
of the Shrew " and the " Merry Wives of Windsor." 
Then follow two further groups, one romantic and 
one serious ; the first contains " Much Ado About 
Nothing," "As You Like It," and " Twelfth Night," 
the second, " All's Well That Ends Well," " Measure 
for Measure," and "Troilus and Cressida." Here, 
according to Professor Dowden, ends the Third 
Period of the great dramatist's work. 

For interest in plot and characters few plays 
can equal " The Merchant of Venice," and we 
have only to study it side by side with Marlowe's 
" Jew of Malta " to fully realise the vast genius of 
the one author compared with the ability of the 
other. 

The whole story hangs together, and the interest 
never flags as it does so soon in the earlier play, 
and though Shylock's character is more minutely 
drawn than is that of Barabas, the interest of the 
story by no means depends on it as does that of 
Marlowe's play on his Jew, 

In his insistence on the repayment of his 
bond from Antonio, Shylock is the typical Jew 



288 IN SHAKSPERE'S ENGLAND 

usurer of the Middle Ages, hard, merciless, and 
grasping — 

" I'll have my bond ; I will not hear thee speak ; 
I'll have my bond, and therefore speak no more. 
I'll not be made a soft and dull-eyed fool, 
To shake the head, relent, and sigh, and yield 
To Christian intercessors. Follow not ; 
I'll have no speaking ; I will have my bond." 

But he rises above the character of a clever 
grasping usurer in his magnificent speech in Act 
III., and seems for a moment to become the 
spokesman of the whole trampled Hebrew race. 

" I am a Jew. Hath not a Jew eyes ? Hath 
not a Jew hands, organs, dimensions, senses, 
affections, passions ? fed with the same food, hurt 
with the same weapons, subject to the same 
diseases, healed by the same means, warmed and 
cooled by the same winter and summer, as a 
Christian is ? " 

And on this very similarity he bases his plea for 
revenge. 

" If you poison us, do we not die ? And if you 
wrong us, shall we not revenge ? If we are like 
you in the rest, we will resemble you in that. If 
a Jew wrong a Christian, what is his humility ? 
Revenge. If a Christian wrong a Jew, what should 
his sufferance be by Christian example ? Why, 
revenge." 



SHAKSPERE 289 

This speech, written when it was, shows how 
marvellously Shakspere's mind rose above the con- 
ventions of his age. 

The story of the opening of the three caskets, 
by which Portia's lovers are to be tried, is told 
with charming detail. First comes the Prince of 
Morocco, and unlocks the golden casket, only to 
read within that 

" All that glisters is not gold." 

Then the Prince of Arragon chooses the silver 
casket, and sees 

" Who chooseth me shall have as much as he deserves." 

And last comes her true love, Bassanio, and tak- 
ing the leaden casket, finds Portia's portrait within 
it, and, according to the will of her father, takes 
her for his bride. 

The wonderful creation of Falstaff, the fat 
knight, runs through several of the Historical Plays, 
and he and the wild Prince Hal at first play their 
pranks together ; their friendship is such that Fal- 
staff before the battle of Shrewsbury entreats the 
Prince — 

" Hal, if thou see me down in the battle, and 
bestride me, so ; 'tis a point of friendship." To 
which the Prince answers — 

T 



290 IN SHAKSPERE'S ENGLAND 

" Nothing but a colossus can do thee that friend- 
ship. Say thy prayers, and farewell." 

And when Douglas attempts single combat with 
Falstaff, near the end of the battle, the valiant fat 
knight settles the matter by feigning death, and 
only comes to life again in time to bear off 
Hotspur's body when the coast is clear of foes. 

Hotspur has fallen in combat with Prince Hal, 
and dies, lamenting not his loss of life, but that he 
has been conquered. 

"O Harry ! thou hast robbed me of my youth. 
I better brook the loss of brittle life 
Than those proud titles thou hast won of me ; 
They wound my thoughts worse than thy sword my flesh." 

In the ''Taming of the Shrew" we have the 
reduction to order of a shrewish wife by a clever 
husband, who feigns to have a temper even more 
violent than her own, but though Katherine and 
Petruchio are an amusing couple with whom to 
spend some hours, they are not the fascinating 
pair of lovers that we find in Beatrice and Bene- 
dick in " Much Ado About Nothing." He is 
exactly the cynical modern man of fashion, and 
she the smart, clever, taking girl, who has won 
men's hearts, in spite of themselves, in every age. 

" At first I noted her not," says Benedick, in 
answer to his friend Claudio's question, " but I 



SHAKSPERE 291 

looked on her," and Beatrice describes him con- 
temptuously as " evermore tattling." 

And their conversation for some time is in the 
same strain as that of the dialogue when she goes 
to call him, and tells him that — 

" Against my will I am sent to bid you come in 
to dinner." 

And he answers mockingly — 

'< Fair Beatrice, I thank you for your pains." 

" I took no more pains for those thanks than 
you take pains to thank me : if it had been painful, 
I would not have come." 

" You take pleasure, then, in the message ? " asks 
he, and she indignantly asserts — 

" Yes, just so much as you may take upon a 
knife's point, and choke a daw withal." 

Much ado about nothing is made throughout 
their wooing, as throughout all else in the play, 
and even their final words to each other are 
spoken in irony, when he tells her, " Come, I will 
have thee ; but by this light, I take thee for pity." 

And she, chiming in with this mood, answers, " I 
would not deny you ; but, by this good day, I yield 
upon great persuasion, and partly to save your life, 
for I was told you were in a consumption." 

After '' Much Ado About Nothing " came the 
wonderful woodland romance, '*As You Like It," 



292 IN SHAKSPERE'S ENGLAND 

where the melancholy Jaques wanders through the 
forest of Arden, and explains his own heaviness of 
heart to Rosalind as being " a melancholy of mine 
own, compounded of many simples, extracted from 
many objects, and indeed the sundry contempla- 
tion of my travels ; which, by often rumination, 
wraps me in a most humorous sadness." 

In "Twelfth Night," which followed "As You 
Like It," there is the ever fresh comedy of Malvolio, 
Olivia's steward, trying to woo her in his yellow 
stockings and his cross garters, and of the comi- 
cally disreputable pair. Sir Toby Belch and Sir 
Andrew Aguecheek. 

The Third Period deals entirely with Tragedy ; 
Professor Dowden divides it into Middle and 
Later Tragedy. To the first belong " Julius 
Csesar " and " Hamlet," and to the last " Othello," 
"King Lear," "Macbeth," "Antony and Cleo- 
patra," " Coriolanus," and " Timon of Athens." 

In Othello we see again, as in the case of Shy- 
lock, the genius of Shakspere rising above the in- 
born prejudices even of race and colour. 

Our hearts go out to the great, brave, dull Moor, 
whose passionate love for his wife leads through 
its blind jealousy to her destruction and his own. 

And surely no bad man was ever drawn with 
more merciless truth than lago, the villain of the 



SHAKSPERE 293 

play, the destroyer of the Moor's home and 
happiness ? Nor have words of more tragic 
pathos been ever uttered than those of Othello's 
last speeches, when by the bedside of his young 
wife, slain by his own hand, he bids his friends 

" Be not afraid, though you do see me weapon'd ; 
Here is my journey's end, here is my butt, 
And very sea-mark of my utmost sail." 

And then to Desdemona — 

" O ill-starr'd wench ! 
Pale as thy smock ! when we shall meet at compt, 
This look of thine will hurl my soul from heaven, 
And fiends will snatch at it." 

And just before he stabs himself with his own 
ill-fated dagger, he gives the explanation of his 
conduct, pathetic in its simplicity, when he bids 
them write of him as 

" Of one that lov'd not wisely but too well ; 
Of one not easily jealous, but being wrought, 
Perplex'd in the extreme." 

The darkness is almost unrelieved in this and 
in the two following plays, the terrible story of 
Lear, King of Britain, and his three daughters, and 
the stirring Scotch tragedy of Macbeth. Surely no 
worldly woman has ever been described as vividly 
as is Lady Macbeth ! We see her constantly at 
her husband's side, ready to urge him up the 
ladder of ambition, and heedless of the blood that 



294 IN SHAKSPERE'S ENGLAND 

stains his footsteps, until that last weird scene 
when she walks in her sleep, and betrays to those 
who watch that — 

" Here's the smell of blood still ; all the perfumes of Arabia 
will not sweeten this little hand." 

It is with relief we feel that Shakspere's last work 
dealt more brightly and more tenderly with life. 

To the Fourth Period belong " Pericles," 
" Cymbeline," " The Tempest," and the " Winter's 
Tale," and in " The Tempest " specially shine out 
the kindly humour, the soft grace and dignity, that 
seem to best befit the evening work of the mighty 
dramatist. 

The wise Prospero and his loving daughter 
Miranda in their home upon the lonely island, the 
gentle sprite Ariel who ministers to Prospero's 
wants, and the brave young lover Ferdinand, all go 
to make up a world of enchantment which is so 
pleasant that one hesitates to leave the island 
where it holds sway. 

There is about Shakspere's figures a reality which 
makes it difficult to believe that they did not all 
live and love, grow merry and sad, fight, struggle, 
and die among the Sidneys and Raleighs, the 
Bacons and Spensers " whose times were one " 
with theirs, and who hardly seem to us more real. 

The Age of Shakspeare and of Elizabeth was 



SHAKSPERE 295 

great in every way ; men's minds were stirred 
and their hearts thrilled by years of religious 
fervour and persecution, they were learning to 
think and act for themselves, and most men 
longed to take their part in the fuller larger life 
that had begun. 

So while some laboured at home to fill the 
land, if possible, with " pure religion and un- 
defiled," others sailed into the West to find the 
far-off El Dorado, or among the ice and snow 
of the Northern Coasts they knelt and prayed 
to God for guidance in their perilous undertaking. 
Statesmen toiled, and learned men gave willingly 
of their learning, that England might grow and 
prosper both in the Old World and the New. 

Statesman, soldier, priest, and adventurer, each 
did his part and went his way, leaving his work 
to be perfected by those who came after him : 
and among them all moves the one alone whose 
work has needed no after touch, who seemed to 
gather up within his giant grasp all that was 
worthiest in his Age. Love, honour, and tender- 
ness, quaint humour, and a wealth of human 
sympathy, beauty and grace in woman, honour 
and nobility in man, all these shine for ever from 
the pages of Shakspere, and nowhere can we see 
a clearer picture of the Age in which he lived. 



^ '>/ 



296 IN SHAKSPERE'S ENGLAND 

There move wise and wily statesmen, chivalrous 
soldiers, fair and gracious ladies, bold adventurers, 
instinct with life and feeling, as in the England 
of his day ; and there too is drawn, as nowhere 
else, the darker side of the picture. Bloodshed, 
intrigue, folly, and deceit hold their sway, and 
bring sorrow and disaster in their train ; but in 
Shakspere's working out of the problems of life 
there is never the least wavering of moral justice : 
he sees the evil, he paints the villain with the 
master hand of genius, but crime has no artistic 
beauty in his eyes. ^^ '^> 

Among the great figures in the Elizabethan 
Age many stand alone, but he stands alone for 
all time ; Bacon's philosophy has been developed, 
Raleigh's New World has been explored, Franklin 
has followed in Davis's wake, and on South African 
battlefields the chivalry of Sidney has shone again, 
but Shakspere lived but once, and his mantle has 
fallen on no successor. 



Printed by Eallantyne, Hanson <jj^ Co 
Edinburgh <5r» London 








,0 o " " "A, •/, 



-4 "7* 






&^' % 








1^ " .-'t.' ^^ ° 

















''^. 



.-.:i 



•b^-^. 



